An Analysis Of Malamud’s The Assistant From Aristotle’s Theory Of Tragedy

Malamud is another famous Jewish writer in the history of contemporary Americanliterature after Singer and Saul Bellow. The critics called him "a real Jewish writer in20thcentury with the most Jewish flavor "（Sheldon N. Grebstein,1980:78）. Malamud is goodat expressing the tenacity and goodness of Jewish people through the describing ofsuffering experiences. The Assistant is published in1957, which is one of hisrepresentative works. By telling a story about the history of a small grocery store and a fewcharacters’ life experiences related to it, Malamud reproduces the life of ordinary Jewishgrocer Morris who is indomitably struggling in misery, and reveals the power of moralbelief. Morris moves Italian young Frank with his kindness and sincerity, makes himconvert to Judaism and accept the Jewish way of life.In the sixth chapter of Poetics, when Aristotle talked about tragedy and its function, hegave tragedy a classic definition:" Tragedy, then, is a process of imitating an action whichhas serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude; by means of languagewhich has been made sensuously attractive, with each of its varieties found separately inthe parts; enacted through narrative; through a course of pity and fear completing thepurification of tragic acts which have those emotional characteristics."（Aristotle1967:25）In this definition," Catharsis " is considered to be the core of tragedy, while pity and fearare the emotional foundation of catharsis. The suffering theme is throughout The Assistant.The life experiences of the protagonist-Morris and his family are full of tragic flavor. AndMorris is a complete tragic character. When appreciating this novel, readers must be deeplymoved by the charm of tragedy. In Aristotle’s opinion,"’catharsis’ makes tragic art producepity and fear to the audiences (the readers), and through certain catharsis of these pain andunhappy passion, the audiences can reach the feeling of happiness and relaxation, andachieve the ’catharsis’ of mind as well."(Cheng Menghui,1994:46) Aristotle’s tragiccatharsis pays more attention to whether audiences’ emotions can get the catharsis of tragicart, so this has also become an important standard to judge the success of a tragedy. Basedon Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, this paper tries to analyze The Assistant from three aspects:tragic theme, tragic character and tragic plot in order to excavate the tragic aesthetic value of the novel. As a result, we can get a better understanding of tragic art and its doublefunction: moral education and spiritual guide.