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Harley Henry: “Them Dodgers is My Gallant Knights”: Fiction as History in the Natural (1952), a photo of Feller bending over his mother’s bed in a Chicago hospital in 1939
Harley Henry’s article ‘“Them Dodgers is My Gallant Knights”: Fiction as History in the Natural (1952)’ analyses the novel The Natural and is full of instances that portrays subtle argumentative differences. From the title of the article to the use of graphic representation, such as the picture of the injured Feller’s mother lying in the hospital bed, Henry strives, and quite sufficiently so, to show the unmarked differences in the history of the American Cold War, as seen through the eyes of one of America’s symbolic features, baseball.
Henry uses the term dodgers in the title of the article as one of the significant identifiers of the fact that the game had some elements of disrepute. Initially, the term dodgers seem to represent a winning baseball team, an inspiration to the author of the novel, The Natural. Yet, the Dodgers lost one of the most important games, a playoff final against New York Giants. This possibly portrays the fact that there are two sides of the Dodgers: the winning inspirational team, and the losers. Team dodgers had dodged to win many important games, an indication of the unseen influences of match fixing.
In this article, Henry, shines much light on baseball heroes as one of Malamud’s inspiration of writing the novel. Malamud focuses on the two sides of the sports heroes. The heroes are presented as men who would have won any game for their teams any day, through a marauding home run. Yet, when it comes to the most important games some of the baseball heroes had an average performance and as such their team lost. Through the evaluation of the conduct of baseball heroes, a keen reader is thus able to identify the real sports heroes (those who preserved the reputation of the game) and the villains like Cal Abrams (sportsmen who brought the game to disrepute).
The photo of Feller’s mother also shows the concealed ugliness of the game. Feller’s mother comes to watch his heroic son and pitcher fall victim to some of the dirty antics of the game. The woman is hit by a ball from non other than the infamous Ted Williams, one of the baseball villains. In the article, Henry portrays Feller’s mother as both the victim of the games dirtiness (a bruised woman with blackened eye and bandages on her head), with whom the sympathetic reader empathizes with. She is also presented as a loving mother.
In a bid to present his arguments strongly, Henry uses juxtaposition as a literary device to effectively highlight the subtle differences. There are two types of sport personalities: the heroes and the villains. These two types of sportsmen are seen playing near each other and sometimes even play the same roles, as team heroes. Furthermore, Henry juxtaposes baseball and basketball, and treats baseball as a less reputable sport.
This is not intended to portray baseball in bad light but to indicate that like many other sports disciplines, baseball is going through ethical challenges. Through the use of juxtaposition, Henry’s weakness is presented in the presentation of argument. To the reader who is not keen, the differences may not be too obvious and as such might be missed.
The author of this article treats the ideas in general way, but still manages to hint that there are variations in arguments which portray some differences. As such, the author is able to present the true picture without being too brash with the truth.
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