The Magic Barrel

Bernard Malamud THE MAGIC BARREL In this story Malamud has gone stomach to the earth of kinsperson tales and sissy tales. His opening words, Not prospicient ago, run across the same note as the fairy tale s once upon a time. The barrel of the agnomen is no everyday barrel but a incantation barrel. Nor is its owner, Pinye Salzman, an ordinary union broker. He seems to be one of those cognize look-alikes from a worldly concern of enchantment. He appears with miraculous look sharp and disappears as if on the fly of the cajoled. His office is in the air. He is perhaps a c slamn-hoofed Pan, shout out nuptial ditties. . . . equivalent so many sorcerers in folk tales, he is at once comic and slightly ominous. Salzman s client, social social lion Finkle, embarks on a quest that is also sanctified in folklore. Traditionally the young hero is seeking a bride and mustiness endure an ordeal in order to win her. As in the famous judgment of Paris, social lion must hold among three women. His experience has many folk elements: loaves of lucre go flying like ducks high over his principal quantity ; the appearance of snow he attributes to Salzman; at the conclusion violins and enlighten candles revolved in the sky. Salzman is a commercial cupid, a meet out of Jewish folklore, and his Yiddishized English and his descriptions of his candidates are hilarious tours de force. The comedy, however, is double-edged, for the scholarly and innocent student is, in his walk along riverbank Drive with Lily Hirschorn, made suddenly aware of his incapacity for love. I am not, he says gravely, a talented religious person. . . . I think . . . that I came to God not because I love Him, but because I did not. The omniscient narrator comments that Leo Finkle did not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man. Initially Leo wished to compel for practical purposes, but now he says, I miss to be in love with the one I marry. Leo falls in love with a picture, another known motif borrowe! d from folklore. He pleads with Salzman to introduce his daughter, but the father replies, If...If you consequence to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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