Gimpel The Fool
An Analysis of Gimpel The Fool
Gimpel the Fool is a story written by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Saul Bellow translated the story I read because the story was written in Yiddish. Gimpel The Fool is a story about a simple man named Gimpel. He is considered by many to be a fool because he is a very gullible man. He is constantly falling for tricks laid out by almost everyone. Gimpel is persuaded to marry Elka, a woman who will wind up using him also. Elka treats Gimpel very poorly. She has “his” child only 17 weeks into the marriage. Gimpel knows the child is not his, but allows himself to be persuaded into thinking that some babies are born premature. Gimpel also catches Elka having an affair, but convinces himself he is making it all up. On her deathbed, Elka confesses that none of his six children are actually his, and she had been cheating on him the whole time. After her death, Gimpel decides to get back at all the townspeople who have been mean to him by baking bread with urine mixed in it. Elka visits him in a dream, and he sees that she is turning black from being in hell. Gimpel changes his mind and buries the bread. He then leaves Frampol, giving all of his money to his children. It is during his journeys that he discovers that there really are no lies; whatever doesn’t happen is dreamed at night. The story ends with Gimpel dying and going to a place where even he cannot be deceived. To find the true meaning of Gimpel The Fool I decided to analyze the plot, characters and point of view.
Plot is a sequence of events; these events include exposition, complicating incident, rising action, technical climax, falling action, dramatic climax and denouement. The three events that I thought were most important in reading Gimpel The Fool were exposition, complicating incident and dramatic climax. In the exposition, we are introduced to Gimpel. It is here that we learn why everyone refers to him as Gimpel the fool. It stems from the fact that as a child he was easily tricked and deceived by the other children. This becomes a major part of Gimpel as the story progresses. Another aspect of the plot is the complicating incident. The complicating incident is where we first see there is a problem. Although many people will think that the problem is that he allows himself to be played the fool, I see the problem as being ...
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...ds during the telling of the story. The presence of the narrator is definitely pervasive. Gimpel is the primary person in every scene. Gimpel’s reliability must be questioned though. I do believe we can rely on what we are being told; however we are only getting one side of the story. I don’t doubt a single thing Gimpel says, but I do have to wonder what is going on with the things we are not being told about.
Through the course of this paper, I have come to realize that it is not the obvious that Singer is trying to tell us. He uses the plot to show us that things are not always what they seem. But we could not discover this without seeing things from Gimpel’s point of view and the insight into his character. He never says he loves Elka, but through his actions, he makes that message quite clear. Had this story been told from someone else’s point of view we would not have been able to see that everything he did was because he loved her. In conclusion, through analysis of the above I have realized the truth of this story…
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On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted for a partition resolution that led to the establishment of the nation of Israel in May, 1948. This was great news for Jews in Palestine and the diaspora as it meant the fulfillment of the quest for the rebirth of their nation in their previous homeland after many years of wandering (Pappe, 2006, p. 12). However, their Palestinian Arab counterparts opposed to the establishment from the start felt cheated by the international community and remained categorical that the final answer to the Jewish problem would only be solved in blood and fire (Karsh, 2002, p. 8).
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