The Fixer: Irony :: Bernard Malamud The Fixer

The Fixer  Irony    Irony is an overpowering force in Bernard Malamuds The Fixer. The sequence of fonts which Yakov Bok goes through makes the entire myth ironic. The chief irony of the saucy lies in the fact that what Bok is attempting to go out, he cannot escape. To understand the irony in the novel, it is undeniable to examine two major events in the circular life of Yakov Bok. Bok is attempting the escape his life in the shetl. He is wrongly persecuted for a ritual cut up and attempts to escape his physical and mental torture. In each case, Bok is attempting to escape his Jewishness. The novel has an overall ironic tone. Bok leaves the shetl in which he has lived the majority of his life to go to Kiev. In Kiev Bok hopes to find opportunities for work and education. Mainly, though, Bok seeks relief from his earlier humiliate of cosmos cuckolded. While in the shetl Bok sees himself as a victim of his wifes barrenness (Unger 447 ). The irony lies in the fa ct that that even after escaping the shetl and being in a different kind of hell, prison, Boks life in the shetl comes back to stamping ground him. Bok learns of a child that Raisl has had with her lover and gives his bitter sentence of a drab cholera upon her ( Malamud 254 ). The one thing that might boast given him gratification in his life before has now gone to someone else. This event brings Yakov shame that he could not father a child with Raisl era another man could. Thus, the problems of the shetl which Bok has tried so desperately to escape have come back to haunt him once again. Boks life is very circular. afterwards in the novel, Raisl visits Yakov in prison in an attempt to end her profess ostracism in the shetl. Yakov could here exact some kind of strike back upon Raisl by allowing her to be ostracized for having an illegitimate child the way he was ostracized for being cuckolded. However, Yakov eventually signs the document which says I declare myself to be th e father of Chaim, the baby son of my wife Raisl Bok... Please help the mother and child, and for this, amid all my troubles, Ill be grateful ( 262). Bok, now having on paper what he once cute most, a son, cannot enjoy it.