Role of Female Characters in Fidelmans Epiphany in Naked Nude :: Naked Nude Bernard Malamud

Role of Female Characters in Fidelmans Epiphany in defenseless Nude Word Count Includes OutlineThesis In his picturesque short story, The Naked Nude, Bernard Malamud uses the female characters to develop, enact, and resolve Fidelmans epiphany and to bring about the protagonists final, artistic self-importance-understanding. Bernard Malamud, a leading contemporary Jewish author, skirts between fantasy and reality in his nearly allegorical short fiction, teaching the reader a lesson through coinciding elements of beauty and comedy. Venturing away from his usual, inner-city Jewish element, Malamud tackles new challenges of subject and setting in his novelistic army of short stories, Pictures of Fidelman Malamud develops his protagonist through a series of six, interrelated short works, each of which may function entirely independent from the others. In The Naked Nude, for instance, Fidelman comes to a new, artistic maturity through his attempt to copy the famous painting Venus of Urbino by Titian Tiziano. Malamuds recurring theme of self-knowledge through suffering permeates this short work. Scarpio and Angelo, as primary antagonists, provide the bulk of this suffering for Fidelman. It is his own mental captivity concerning the female nude, however, that gives cause for Fidelmans eventual epiphany as an artist and as an individual. His relationship to the women in the work shapes his ability to capture the form of the Venus and to come to grips with his own self-worth. In The Naked Nude, Bernard Malamud uses the female characters to develop, enact, and resolve Fidelmans epiphany and to bring about the protagonists final, artistic self understanding. At the storys outset, Fidelman is forced to act as janitor and manservant to a group of ill mannered prostitutes under the employment of the padrone, Angelo. These offensive characters establish the first of a series of mental obstacles in the imprisoned protagonists attempt to copy Titians nude. They torment F idelman with cynical laughter and exploit his demeaning position. His sexual insecurity is established at the beginning of the story when he ponders his violent guillotine sketch, asking A mans head or his sex?...either case a terrible wound (Malamud 318). The limited omniscient narrator, revealing Fidelmans thoughts and feelings, also suggests that he could gain no inspiration from whores, and that maybe too many naked women around made it impossible to draw a nude (Malamud 325). This illustrates Fidelmans early accreditation of his artistic impotency to desensitization. He soon recognizes, however, that the way in which he views the Venus also interrupts his progress.