The Natural Themes

Baseball prodigy Roy Hobbs’s past is only tenuously sketched out in The Natural, but the novel suggests that he has come from virtually nothing. Yet The Natural is hardly a rags-to-riches novel; it might more accurately be described as a rags-to-rags novel, since Hobbs never successfully transcends his troubled past to become well-adjusted and wealthy. Thus, The Natural presents a counterpoint to the myth of the American dream: the notion that even the…

Baseball in The Natural looks different from how readers might picture it today. Disorganized, low-paying, and unglamorous, American baseball of the mid-twentieth century hardly seems desirable as a career path, and Malamud’s descriptions of the game attest to the dishonesty and tyranny of its bosses and players. Throughout the novel, Malamud examines American society through the lens of baseball, a quintessentially American sport, ultimately arguing that both are steeped in cruelty and corruption.

Malamud portrays…

The Natural’s two main female characters are presented as opposites. Iris, the young grandmother Hobbs rejects, is innocent, kind, and maternal, often dressed in white to emphasize her goodness and purity of character. In contrast, Memo, Hobbs’s primary love interest, is cruel, shallow, and materialistic, and frequently wears symbolically sinister colors like red or black. In other words, Iris represents the “Madonna” stereotype of femininity—an archetypal figure of purity and salvation—while Memo…