SOURCE: "Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1966, pp. 5-18.

In the following essay, Buchen examines elements of Singer's narrative structure that "meaningfully violate and reconstitute the reader's identity, morality and chronology" to evoke a timeless quality in his fiction. Buchen discusses The Magician of Lublin as a typical example of Singer's all-encompassing vision in which time and space converge on absolute morality.

The basic obstacle to an understanding of the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer is its effect of critical dislocation. Thus, the few existing studies symptomatically tend to be partial or fragmented: Eugene Goodheart emphasizes Singer's Yiddishkeit; Irving Howe his modernity and demonism; David Boroff his faddish popularity among college intellectuals; and Dan Jacobson the complexity of his stylistic simplicity. But the whole of Singer is greater than the sum of these parts, and any consideration which has...