In The Natural, Bernard Malamud exposes Roy’s failure as a hero by making parallels to King Arthur’s fall, Narcissus’ pride, and Jung’s archetype of a hero. Similar to King Arthur, Roy fails to become a hero because they both struggle to decide what is important. Roy’s first mistake is when he goes to see Harriet and the narrator states, “He walked-it seemed ages because he was impatient-through a long corridor till he found her number and knocked” (Malamud 34). Roy does not think ahead to his future baseball career, but instead only thinks about sleeping with Harriet. He does not realize the possible consequences of sleeping with Harriet right before his tryouts for the Cubs. The possibility of sleeping with Harriet leads to a potentially …show more content…
Later on in The Natural, Roy makes a similar mistake by trying to make money to go out with Memo. The narrator explains, “If [Memo] would go out with him … But to do that and buy her some decent presents a guy needed cash, and on the meager three thousand he got he had beans-barely enough to pay for his hotel bill” (Malamud 88). Roy cares more about getting the money to go out with Memo than winning the Pennant for the Knights. He ignores what Pop Fisher told him about Memo, and he decides to be closer to Memo. Like Roy, King Arthur also makes many mistakes that cause his failure. J.M. Armistead analyzes Arthur as one who cares more about his love life than about his kingdom. Armistead emphasizes his point when he writes, “But the future of Britain depends only in part upon the displacing of Oswald’s perception of love by Arthur’s; it also hangs on the emergence of a new vision of heroism” (Armistead 59-60). Arthur is giving up too much of his kingdom for love. Arthur does not understand that being a hero requires one to make good choices. Arthur has too much pride in his own personal glory and not enough for the sacrifice he needs to make to help his kingdom. His pride leads him to lack wisdom when Armistead writes, “Arthur, too, needs wholeness