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 poorest Americans can become rich and influential through sheer ambition and by working their way up the ranks. Malamud uses Hobbs’s narrative progression from promising ambition to failure to argue that though the American dream is motivational and inspiring, it is ultimately illusory.
Initially, Roy Hobbs is hopeful that baseball will provide him with a way to leave behind a childhood of poverty and abuse, and that as the American dream promises, he will be able to work his way up to a comfortable life of affluence. Yet even though baseball is quintessentially American—the modern version of the sport has its origins in America—it does not provide the material wealth and social status Hobbs seeks, suggesting that if even the most American sport cannot propel him toward the American dream, nothing can.
Hobbs’s family is destitute; he describes his mother as a “whore” who once drowned a cat in front of him before abandoning the family, and notes that his father “dumped [him] in one orphan home after the other.” The only useful skill he learned from his family was baseball (his father taught him how to “toss a ball”), positioning the sport as his only hope for a better life. As a sport that offers significant perks—celebrity, trips to cities for training and try-outs, access to high-class amenities—the young Hobbs is drawn to baseball, which offers him a way out of poverty. However, his low-class status makes it difficult for him to navigate these features, suggesting that true social mobility—transitioning smoothly from poverty to affluence—is impossible. Furthermore, baseball is not as glamorous as Hobbs’s first experiences with the sport make it seem. Hobbs is not afforded enough money out of his advance to pay for housing, and rather than benefiting from an appropriate salary, baseball players like Hobbs are forced to rely on the generosity of fans who lavish him with consumer merchandise on his “day,” an event meant to celebrate and support baseball’s best players. Thus, baseball fails to live up to the fantasies that Hobbs concocts, enchanted by its allure and promises of celebrity, and his desire for the American dream goes unfulfilled.
Hobbs’s progress toward the American dream is continually hindered, since his unbridled ambition—the quality supposedly needed to achieve the American dream—proves harmful rather than helpful. Cynical and conniving, Hobbs is unkind to his teammates, his love interests, and his team’s manager, Pop Fisher. By prioritizing his own wishes and focusing on his career, Hobbs achieves temporary success, becoming the team’s strongest player and a celebrity in his own right, but alienates everyone around him in the process. In addition, though Hobbs is driven, he lacks a more meaningful and clear-eyed understanding of his identity and what he wants in life outside of wealth and fame. When he talks to a recent acquaintance named Harriet Bird about what he wants in life, all he can articulate is a vague statement that spotlights his ambition: “I feel that I have got it in me—that I am due for something very big.” When Harriet tries to dig deeper, asking if Hobbs craves “some more glorious meaning to his life and activities” that is “over and above earthly things,” Hobbs is unable to respond, since he can’t see a future for himself beyond a simplistic vision of celebrity and affluence. He often thinks about eschewing his ambitions and returning to a more humble lifestyle—represented by the image of the boy and his dog, a reflection of himself in childhood, that appears in his dreams and hallucinations.
As the novel unfolds, Hobbs’s single-minded and shallow pursuit of success gets him into trouble and ultimately causes him to fall prey to corruption when he accepts a bribe that destroys his baseball career. Far from allowing him to enter the glorious gates of the American dream, Hobbs’s aspirations for wealth and success cost him those very things. Judge Banner, the co-owner of the Knights, denies Hobbs the full salary he deserves even after significant negotiation, and Hobbs finds that achieving fame through baseball fails to carry the weight it is supposed to. Hobbs gambles, battles with journalists who threaten to ruin his reputation, and otherwise struggles to maintain influence within the world of the sport. His performance, though generally strong, becomes erratic at times because of the pressure of his newfound notoriety, and he is persistently plagued by anxiety and insecurities about his future. Toward the end of the novel, Hobbs accepts the Judge’s bribe to “throw” (deliberately lose) the final game of the season in part to earn more money than he otherwise would from his meager salary (and to prove to his love interest, Memo, that he can provide her with an affluent life), but he relinquishes the bribe payment out of guilt. The novel implies that Hobbs’s reputation will be publicly maligned in the press by the journalist Max Mercy, who has discovered the bribe. Despite his efforts and ambition, Hobbs never transcends his destitute background, since he leaves behind his career without ever having become truly notable, wealthy, and successful. Ultimately, the American dream eludes Hobbs. Contrary to the myth’s telling, hard work and ambition—especially when coupled with insecurity and self-doubt—are not enough to achieve success.
The concept of the American dream is the fiction that motivates young, ambitious Roy Hobbs as he attempts to navigate baseball and American society more broadly. Though Hobbs follows this narrative—working doggedly, even ruthlessly, to achieve his goals—he is unable to maintain the success he initially enjoys as the Knights’ breakout player. Thus, Malamud suggests that the American dream is as inspiring as it is ultimately mythical. The Natural leaves readers with the bleak conclusion that even “natural” talent and tireless effort cannot always counterweigh poverty, a low-class background, and self-doubt, and that the American dream proves difficult (or nearly impossible) to come by.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Ambition, Failure, and the American Dream ThemeTracker
Ambition, Failure, and the American Dream 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.
[B1]Harriet brightened, saying sympathetically, “What will you hope to accomplish, Roy?”
He had already told her but after a minute remarked, “Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.”
She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. “Is that all?” […] “Isn’t there something over and above earthly things—some more glorious meaning to one’s life and activities?”
She pulled the trigger (thrum of bull fiddle). The bullet cut a silver line across the water. He sought with his bare hands to catch it, but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut. A twisted dagger of smoke drifted up from the gun barrel. Fallen on one knee he groped for the bullet, sickened as it moved, and fell over as the forest flew upward, and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, danced on her toes around the stricken hero.
For his bulk [Roy Hobbs] looked lithe, and he appeared calmer than he felt, for although he was sitting here on this step he was still in motion. He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived.
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.
Staring at the light gleaming on Pop’s bald bean, Roy felt himself going off … way way down, drifting through the tides into golden water as he searched for this lady fish, or mermaid, or whatever you called her […] Sailing lower into the pale green sea, he sought everywhere for the reddish glint of her scales, until the water became dense and dark green and then everything gradually got so black he lost all sight of where he was.
As Bump ran for it he could feel fear leaking through his stomach, and his legs unwillingly slowed down, but then he had this vision of himself as the league’s best outfielder, acknowledged so by fans and players alike [..] Thinking this way he ran harder […] and with a magnificent twisting jump, he trapped the ball in his iron fingers. Yet the wall continued to advance, and […] Bump bumped it with a skull-breaking bang.
When Bump died Memo went wild with grief. Bump, Bump, she wailed, pounding on the wall […] In her mind she planted kisses all over the corpse and when she kissed his mouthless mouth blew back the breath of life, her womb stirring at the image of his restoration. Yet she saw down a dark corridor that he was laid out dead, gripping in his fingers the glowing ball he had caught.
Even the weather was better, more temperate after the insulting early heat, with just enough rain to keep the grass a bright green and yet not pile up future double headers. Pop soon got into the spirit of winning, lowered the boom on his dismal thoughts, and showed he had a lighter side […] His hands healed and so did his heart.
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.
[Hobbs] woke in the locker room, stretched out on a bench […] He sat there paralyzed though his innards were in flight […] He longed for a friend, a father, a home to return to—saw himself packing his duds in a suitcase, buying a ticket, and running for a train. Beyond the first station he’d fling Wonderboy out the window.
It later struck him that the picture he had drawn of Memo sitting domestically home wasn’t exactly the girl she was. The kind he had in mind, though it bothered him to admit it, was more like Iris seemed to be, only she didn’t suit him. Yet he could not help but wonder what was in her letter.
[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.
When [Roy Hobbs] hit the street he was exhausted. He had not shaved, and a black beard gripped his face […] He stared into faces of people he passed along the street but nobody recognized him.
“He coulda been a king,” a woman remarked to a man.
At the corner near some stores he watched the comings and goings of the night traffic. He felt the insides of him beginning to take off (chug chug choo choo…). Pretty soon they were in fast flight.
