The American Dream and a Lost Eden in The Tenants Essay -- Interplay b

The Tenants is star of the most accomplished novels from a writer Malamud who is one of the finest post-war American novelists. The novel describes the confrontation of two writers one Jewish, the other African-American and probes into the nature of the art of writing. His novels exhibit an interlacing of fantasy and reality with equal importance on moral obligation. The setting of the novel at issue is unused York City, where the theme of self exploration is gradually developed through the contrast amid two writers, one Jewish and the other black, seek to survive in an urban ghetto. Their confrontation about artistic standards bring out the essential theme of how race informs cultural identity, the purpose of literature, and the conflict between art and life. Malamud blends gritty realism, absurd comedy and fantasy to deal with social issue as well as nature of creative writing process. The Tenants tells the account of a writer labouring to complete a novel which he has be en struggling over for the past ten years. He stays in a dilapidated building in Manhattan of which he is the sole tenant. He stays there much to the chagrin of its troubled owner who is eager to demolish it. The touch gets worse as an aspiring black writer sneaks into the building and starts his literary pursuit. Though the two characters Harry and Willie are polarized and stereotyped, their relationship is defined with a earthshaking amount of psychological accuracy. The surrealistic quality of the novel suggests the way in which art in the form of romance conveys the actual essence of human experience. The urban renewal process is rendered with a certain nightmarish quality that depicts a kind of waste land. The following description is parti... ...lection of Critical Essays.Englewood Cliffs Prentice Hall, 1975.---, Eds. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York New York UniversityPress, 1971.Howard, Leon. Literature and the American Tradition. Garden City Doubleday, 1960.Levi ne, George. Realism Reconsidered. The Theory of the Novel, ed. JohnHalperin. New York Oxford University Press, 1974.Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant. 1957 rpt. New York Dell, 1971.---. The Tenants. 1971 rpt. New York Pocket Books, 1972.Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land The American Novel in theNineteen- Sixties. New Haven Yale University Press, 1973.Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel. Carbondale Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975.