Isaac Bashevis Singer-"Gimpel the Fool"

This may be true, and it is for current the argument of the entire story that it is true, plainly it does not nevertheless Gimpel from much pain as the target of ridicule and cruelty. His wife is the main culprit in his evil d wiz against him. He does not know it, but none of the six children she has eyepatch married to him are his own children. She is not dismantle sure which of the many men she has slept with while married actually fathered the children. He actually catches her in bed with separate men twice, but both times he is convinced and/or convinces himself that he has imagined what he actually cut. His need for Elka and for "his" children overcomes his knowledge of the truth of her adultery. His hit the hay overcomes his shame.

I lived twenty years with my wife. She bore me six children, four daughters and two sons. All kinds of things happened, but I neither saw nor heard. I believed, and that's all. The rabbi recently aid to me, "Belief in itself is beneficial. It is scripted that a good man lives by his faith (106).

If the last mentioned description is true, then Gimpel is surely a good man, for, as he himself says, he turned his back on what he heard and saw, and chose instead to live according to his faith that what Elka told him was true. Clearly, his statement that "all kinds of things happened" means that over and over he was certain on some level of his wife's transgressions against their marital oath.

On the other hand, the statement that "I neither saw n

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. "Gimpel the Fool." 98-109.

But it is only when the manager embarrasses them and treats them with open disrespect, even scorn, that Sammy awakens. Even though he recognizes that the girls are from a higher(prenominal) class socially and economically, buying fancy canned herrings for Queenie's parents, he nevertheless identifies with them as young and free and alive, in air to the store manager in all respects.

It is a depleted awakening, but it is irreversible. He has taken a stand for something beyond himself. He had the opportunity to back down, but he refused it: " at one time you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it" (17).

However, that "gesture" can also set a person, such as Sammy, on a path altogether different than the one he had been on before that gesture. His slim feeling of identification with the girls as real, feeling human beings, instead of objects of teenage lust, is certainly a cash in one's chips toward love. And it is a move which he recognizes for its importance, although that does not mean it will be a change without pain. He goes outside to finger the girls gone, which means one of the aims of his rebellion was unfulfilled. But he had another aim as well---to upset the status quo of the store, which symbolizes the conventional adult world. However, he turns to find the manager checking his customers out of the store: nothing has changed. Except, that is, inside Sammy: "My give birth kind of fell as I felt how overweight the world was going to be to me hereafter" (17).

John Updike, in the short story "A & P," presents the tale of Sammy, a shop assistant at the store of the title, and an incident in his life which certainly transformed him through love and desire. It would be difficult to make out that Sammy felt love for, or was in love with "Queenie" or either of the other two girls who came into the store in their clean suits, but it is undeniable that something radically changed in the way he perceived the girls. This change in perception, and
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