SOURCE: Natanson, Maurice. “Solipsism and Sociality.” New Literary History 5, no. 2 (winter 1974): 237-44.

In the following essay, Natanson offers a phenomenological perspective on “Gimpel the Fool.”

In one edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer's story “Gimpel the Fool,” the concluding paragraph carries the line: “At the door of the hotel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away.”¹ Lying on his “bed of straw,” his shrouds in his sack, ready to greet his Maker at the door of the hotel, Gimpel, turned itinerant beggar—a shnorrer—awaits death. In the opening paragraph of the story, Gimpel tells us that he “was no weakling. If I slapped someone he'd see all the way to Cracow.” It would seem that when he left his village of Frampol to go “into the world” and after having “wandered over the land,” Gimpel ended up in Cracow, for where...