At one point in the novel, Hobbs witnesses what he takes to be an “illusion” in the road: “a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog,” an image that comes to symbolize Hobbs’s longing for his childhood and his feelings of uncertainty surrounding adulthood. Disoriented, Hobbs loses control of the car, and he believes that he may have hit the boy, but when he goes back to check, he finds no body. This image continues to recur in Hobbs’ imagination—he sees a similar image, that of a young boy throwing a ball, on the train to Chicago at the beginning of the novel—and he eventually remembers that as a child, he once wandered into the woods to find his lost dog, getting a “scared and lonely feeling that he was impossibly lost.” Hobbs’ hallucination thus represents his own feeling of “being lost” as an adult: his own inability to figure out what he wants from life, and to grapple with the moral difficulties of being a part of a highly corrupt sport.
The hallucination of the boy and his dog also demonstrates Hobbs’s yearning for the simplicity of childhood: Hobbs remembers that once he found his dog, it led him out of the woods, and that this “was good out of good.” At times, Hobbs wishes “he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had […] he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood.” Even though his childhood was fraught with challenges, Hobbs remembers that he was once satisfied with few material possessions—he was content to live a simple life with just a loyal dog by his side, surrounded by nature—and he begins to feel disillusioned with his own pursuit of wealth and power as a baseball star. By “running over” the boy and his dog, Hobbs unconsciously defies his own yearning for the simplicity of the past, yet this desire returns to him nonetheless—just as the image of the boy and the dog does. Thus, these imagined figures symbolize Hobbs’ uncertainty about his own path in life, serving as a palpable reminder of the purposelessness he begins to experience as he becomes a famous player.
The Boy and His Dog Quotes in The Natural
As [Roy Hobbs] was looking, there flowed along this bone-white farmhouse with sagging skeletal porch, alone in untold miles of moonlight, and before it this white-faced, long-boned boy whipped with train-whistle yowl a glowing ball to someone hidden under a dark oak, who shot it back without thought, and the kid once more wound and returned. Roy shut his eyes to the sight because if it wasn’t real it was a way he sometimes had of observing himself.
As the train skirted close in, the trees leveled out and he could see within the woodland the only place he had been truly intimate with in his wanderings, a green world shot through with weird light and strange bird cries, muffled in silence that made the privacy so complete his inmost self had no shame of anything he thought there, and it eased the body-shaking beat of his ambitions.
Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet in all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps. It was different than he had thought it would be. So different he almost felt like walking out, jumping back on a train, and going wherever people went when they were running out on something. Maybe for a long rest in one of those towns he had lived in as a kid. Like the place where he had that shaggy mutt that used to scamper through the woods.
He felt contentment in moving. It rested him by cutting down the inside motion—that which got him nowhere, which was where he was and [Memo] was not, or where his ambitions were and he was chasing after. Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had—a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved.
He felt he had been running for ages, then this blurred black forest slid past him, and as he slowed down, each black tree followed a white, and then all the trees were lit in somber light till the moon burst forth through the leaves and the woods glowed. Out of it appeared this boy and his dog, and Roy in his heart whispered him a confidential message: watch out when you cross the road, kid.
[A]s the Judge had talked [Roy Hobbs] recalled an experience he had had when he was a kid. He and his dog were following an old skid road into the heart of a spooky forest when the hound suddenly let out a yelp, ran on ahead, and got lost. It was late in the afternoon and he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the dog there alone all night, so he went into the wood after it. At first he could see daylight between the trees—to this minute he remembered how still the trunks were, as the tree tops circled around in the breeze […] but just at about the time the darkness got so thick he was conscious of having to shove against it as he hallooed for the dog, he got this scared and lonely feeling that he was impossibly lost.
The Boy and His Dog Symbol Timeline in The Natural
