Hit or Miss: Thematic Causality in The Natural

Spoiler Alert: This article reveals the endings to both The Natural novel and movie.

It’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs. The New York Knights are down 2-0 with men on first and third. Roy Hobbs steps to home plate. A thundering chant from the New York crowd echoes, “Roy! Roy! Roy!”, as Number 9 battles for their entry into the World Series. Hobbs fights off Pirate pitching to a full count and the game comes down to one final swing of the bat. Enter slow motion; the key of “F” tensely enters and crescendoes as Roy Hobbs draws back his weapon. Hobbs swings! The crowd erupts! Strike three, Hobbs is out. The stadium lights remain unscathed and a dejected crowd spares no sonic space for a triumphant Randy Newman movie score, at least not in author Bernard Malamud’s 1952 thematic vision of The Natural. The result of Roy Hobbs’s final swing of the bat distinguishes The Natural's literary theme from its cinematic theme. That one final swing separates Bernard Malamud’s allegory of the hero’s failure to integrate reality and myth, from director Barry Levinson's 1984 "American Dream" fable in which Hobbs earns his divinity. In other words, Malamud’s Greek fails to adapt to 1930’s America while Levinson’s American ascends Mount Olympus; a distinction between the novel and movie that is solely dictated by their individual resolutions and not the nuances leading up to their respective climaxes.

The Natural, at an agreeable level to both mediums, is the story of Roy Hobbs, a 19 year old pitching prospect who is shot by sociopath Harriet Bird en route to a Chicago Cubs tryout. Sixteen years pass before the 34 year old rookie mysteriously enters a struggling New York Knights dugout carrying his hand-crafted bat “Wonderboy”. Wanting to make up for lost time, Hobbs wins a starting spot on Pop Fisher’s roster after literally knocking the cover off the ball when prompted figuratively by the manager. Throughout his record-breaking season, Hobbs struggles as a moral judge of women, money, and baseball, while imposing his Malamudian amalgam of mythic powers on the annals of baseball mythos.

The original Bernard Malamud Hobbs character is assembled from derivatives of Homeric, Arthurian, and Mesopotamian mythologies. These include a recurring lightning symbol, which like Zeus, Hobbs seems to generate at will; Hobbs’s legendary bat “Wonderboy”, analogous to Arthur’s legendary sword Excalibur; and an aging hero’s quest for immortality, like Uruk’s Gilgamesh. More importantly, Hobbs is created in the image of baseball mythology itself: “America’s Pastime”, the fabled sport for which he is its self-realized hero and delusional sole protector. It is this sense of heroism in the novel that first strips Hobbs of his potential, and later, his myth. In Myth Inside and Out: Malamud’s “The Natural”, Frederick W. Turner, III writes:

Roy Hobbs, Malamud’s hero, is one who lives and finds his meaning only within this mythology and this is his tragic weakness. He is obsessed with a sense of mission which is nothing less than to fill out the heroic proportions which the pattern casts for those who would follow it. Roy’s lack of any values outside the mythology is one of the major sources of the tragicomic quality which Malamud has been able to impart to the novel. (136)

For instance, even after Bird aims a pistol at him, Hobbs is still too self-absorbed in his own mythic promise to realize the trouble it has brought him, Malamud writes:

He was greatly confused and thought she was kidding but a grating lump formed in his throat and his blood shed ice. He cried out in a gruff voice, “What’s wrong here?” She said sweetly, “Roy, will you be the best there ever was in the game?” “That’s right.” She pulled the trigger... (34)

And later, to reinforce his budding myth with love’s merit, Hobbs spurns “good” Iris Lemon due to her evocation, as a grandmother, of his mortality. Instead, he pursues “evil” Memo Paris for her youth. Only, to attain Memo, Hobbs must compromise the same myth he sought her youth to preserve and accept Judge Goodwill’s bribe to sabotage the final game. Frederick W. Turner, III continues, “Roy Hobbs is the hero of a mythology, but ultimately fails that mythology by his inability to see and act beyond it without destroying it from himself” (139). After Hobbs realizes this hypocrisy, his attempt to defy Goodwill comes too late; Hobbs’s myth, symbolized by “Wonderboy”, splits in two. To reclaim his legend, Hobbs must absolve his baseball crime with a mortal bat that only his Levinson persona proves to wield effectually.

The Barry Levinson Hobbs character, retaining some of Malamud’s mythic constituents, thrives on the challenge of his mythical setting. In Archetype and Irony in “The Natural”, Ronald K. Giles writes, “The “American Dream” constitutes the movie’s mythic foreground: the country boy leaves the farm on an interrupted journey toward success as a major league baseball player” (49). Roy Hobbs, who symbolizes America’s “self-made”, begins his campaign as a naive farm boy left with his father’s parting advice, “You got a gift, Roy. But it’s not enough. You gotta develop yourself. Rely too much on your own gift and you’ll fail” (Levinson). In the final scene of Levinson’s movie, Hobbs is shown emitting a heavenly glow while playing catch in an ethereal field with his own son; clearly, a symbol of his deification for his “development” of hard work and perseverance in a system which idealistically rewards such qualities.

However, if Levinson’s Hobbs strikes out in the same fashion as Malamud’s Hobbs, a thematic transformation occurs in the assumption that the protagonist, relying too much on his gift, never does in fact develop himself. A Hobbs unwilling to develop himself is a Hobbs at odds with the reality beyond his own myth, or Malamud’s exact theme. In turn, if Malamud’s Hobbs hits a home run without the services of “Wonderboy”, his execution has a direct causal effect on the author’s conclusion:

And there was also a statement by the baseball commissioner. “If this alleged report is true, that is the last of Roy Hobbs in organized baseball. he will be excluded from the game and his records forever destroyed.” Roy handed the paper back to the kid. “Say it ain’t true, Roy.” When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears. (Malamud 231)

For one, a home run exonerates him from alleged scandal. And two, Hobbs’s baseball records are saved, rewarding his hard work and perseverance by deifying his baseball career, or Levinson’s exact theme.

This thematic transformation is nullified of course if The Natural’s thematic crux isn’t Hobbs’s final swing, but his final pitch. For in theory, if young Hobbs doesn’t strike out “The Whammer” (Babe Ruth) at a carnival in the beginning, he is spared Harriet Bird’s bullet and his career flourishes. Yet, whether or not Hobbs is shot has no real effect on his decision to later develop himself or live solely within his myth. Therefore, a thematic crux can only occur when that moment is defined, or after Hobbs’s final swing. And being that the outcome of his final swing directly decides one of two themes, it is then only that final swing that separates The Natural’s Malamud theme from its Levinson theme.