SOURCE: Lauricella, John A. “‘Only Connect’: The Tragicomic Romance of Roy Hobbs.” In Homes Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction, pp. 143-60. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Lauricella considers The Natural as a composite of novel and romance with a “failed hero.”

The romance, which deals with heroes, is intermediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Since its publication almost fifty years ago, Bernard Malamud's first novel has been the object of so much critical attention that a recent commentator has remarked, “The Natural lives to be interpreted—or did before it was interpreted to death.”¹ It is regrettable that the book's mythic content should have caused its demise after having vouchsafed it a kind of vogue among academically-trained readers, but this fate is, perhaps, poetically just. Its hero, Roy...