Depiction of Suffering and Moral Transformation in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant

Abstract

In the post-war period of bad faith and nihilism, the Jew has emerged as a symbol of compassion in American Jewish fiction. The Jews are considered as victims at the hands of fate because of the historic rootlessness and the Holocaust inflicted on them. Thus suffering has been an indispensable part of the Jews, and that is explicitly reflected in Jewish writing. But suffering is not just a strain in Malamud’s fiction; it is a necessary condition for the emergence of compassion, which in turn is the ethos of Malamud’s moral vision. Therefore, the present research article not only shows the depiction of suffering but also presents the novelist’s moral vision.