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Originally Posted by issybird
Poor Roy; he's a slow learner. He did take away something from Iris after all. She said to him during their evening at the lake:
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"We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness."
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The first sentence is one of my favorite of the book. The second is textbook Greek tragedy, which has been discussed by those more learned than me above. But, again, I see the the fact that Thomas Hardy was the focus of Malamud's study. Take this from
The Mayor of Castorbridge:
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“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
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A quick JSTOR search on Hardy turns up hundreds of articles on suffering in his work, and if Malamud was mired in that for at least two years to do the thesis it had to work its way into his writing DNA. I guess combining that with the news of the time of baseball players being shot by dames made for one hell of an alchemy.