Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is a mysterious novel with very interesting dialogue and detail. Although the narrator’s name is never said or mentioned, Potok still managed to write this thrilling novel that has readers at the edge of their seats. In this novel, a 15 year-old boy, who is a protagonist, has a deep love for baseball shares Jewish culture and habits. Him and all the boys who go to school together play baseball on their spare time and are all on the same baseball team. While being friends and sharing many hobbies, the boys finally meet anonymous narrator’s father. Without the narrator even knowing why, all the boys become distant from him and seem to have formed an alliance against him after they had met his father. They had tried …show more content…
By Chaim Potok doing this, he is showing how mysterious this character and this novel is. Anonymous narrator talks about his love for baseball several times throughout this novel. He’s a 15 year-old Jewish boy who is very kind-hearted. While sharing his love for baseball, this boy joins a baseball team with several other boys already on it just after World War II. These boys grow close and end up being really close friends. One of anonymous narrator’s best friends is introduced as Danny Saunders, a Jewish follower along with his father. Unlike Danny, anonymous narrator can enter the secular world while still retaining his Jewish identity. Throughout this novel, anonymous narrator goes through a great deal of growth. At the start of the novel, he accidentally gets his left eye hurt during a big baseball game. After a while, his actual physical sight is regained, but metaphorically, he turns “blind” after this incident. He ends up seeing Danny, his best friend, only as a Hasidic Jew, not as an individual person with his own feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The narrator explains himself in the novel “Suddenly I had the feeling that everything around me was out of focus.” (Potok 133) This is the way he saw Danny in his eyes, With the help of anonymous narrator’s father, anonymous narrator learns to not pay attention to his weird thoughts and later looks beneath