Study Guide to

I.B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool"

Note:  to make use of this Study Guide, you'll need to print out a hard copy to have on hand as you read the story.  If you're printing in one of the KSU public computing labs, you'll first need to go into the File menu (upper left-hand corner of your browser), choose the option for "Page Setup," and click on "Black Type." This insures that any colored text will print out instead of leaving a blank space.

As per routine in our course, you want to allow yourself at least three readings of the story. Devote your first reading to simply discovering what happens.  Of course there are certain standard general curiosities you'll be bringing to bear from the start.

(1)  Where, for instance, do the events of the story seem to be taking place?

(2)  Who is the protagonist, and how are you led to feel about him?  How you come out in your feelings will depend in good part on how you feel about some other things you notice:

• What problems does he confront, and how does he deal with them?
  

(3)  What puzzlements, if any, does the story leave us with when we're through reading (i.e., have finished our first reading)?

• Might the story be designed to leave us puzzled in these ways (and if so, to what possible end?), or is it just that we've probably overlooked something that we were supposed to have noticed on first acquaintance?
  

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your first reading.

In your second reading, press for more specificity in your grasp of certain things.

• Writers depend on their readers' being able to understand certain social practices without special explanation. When a story is redirected from its primary audience to some other (a more general one, or one some generations later), sometimes an editor will need to supply certain information in footnotes or a preface. But often readers can figure out for themselves a lot on their own.
  
  • The setting here is the Jewish ghetto of the Polish town Frampol (a fictional place) a day's walk from Lublin, probably sometime in the earlier part of this century (sometime at any rate before the great disaster of European Jewry, which got under way outside Germany with the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. Can you figure out
    
  • How do marriages come about?

    How do households supply themselves with food (meat, milk, bread, etc.)?

    What is the general role of the local rabbi in such communities?

    • He presides at / conducts a variety of religious rituals, of course. (Which ones are mentioned in the course of the story?)
    • What is a rabbinic court? (What sorts of cases come before it? What does the rabbi do when he's not sure of how to decide?)
    • Anything else important?

      The word "rabbi" comes from a Hebrew word meaning "my lord" or "my master and teacher."

      • What personal qualities would an individual need to have in order to discharge the duties of a rabbi?

        What experiences would one seek out in order to build such qualities?

        What institutions and larger social practices would need to be in place if there is to be occasion to acquire such experiences?

  What beliefs are current about ethics and morality (right and wrong in conduct, obligations and duties, rights and permission)?

  • Are these universally shared, or are they occasions of conflict?

    Even when general principles are shared, do conflicts arise in their application to concrete situations?

  What beliefs are current about the natural world? about the supernatural?

  • Are these universally shared?

• Traditional story-tellers have always engaged readers by drawing them into stresses and strains - conflicts. Often the protagonist will be involved in more than one conflict, on more than one front.  Yet usually - especially in short fiction - one of these will be "foregrounded" as the stories central conflict.  Moreover, the others will relate in some insight-affording way to this central one.  Practiced readers sooner or later try to get clear about what conflict is serving as the story's dramatic "center of gravity," about which are "satellites" of this one, and how they serve to clarify it.
  
• • How many different conflicts - or dimensions of conflict - can you spot at work in Singer's story?
    

    Which would you settle on as the central one in the story as a whole?
    

    • Reflect a little:  what criteria are you resorting to in order to pick this out? (Can you think of some additional ones that might be relevant to consult?)
      

    What kinds of questions do the subordinate conflicts tend to raise - or to suggest ways of resolving - about this central one?
    

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your second reading of the story.

During your third reading, you might want to explore some issues that arise when we reflect on this story in the context of a certain interesting strand in Western religious tradition, both Jewish and Christian. (There are counterparts in Buddhism and Islam as well.)  This is the idea that, because of the Fall of Mankind (in the Garden of Eden, shortly after the Creation of the World itself), mankind in general is mired in sin and error, and that therefore the values that prevail in society at large are perverse - at odds with the Will of the Creator.  Put another way:  much of common sense is simply corrupt.  But since in the afterlife God will punish evil and reward good, people who act according to common sense are doomed.  The consequence is a deep and dangerous paradox about "the good life":  since worldly wisdom is folly, it is condemned to see true wisdom as folly.  The person whose will accords with God's, will in the light of common sense appear to be a madman or a dolt.  Such a paradox offers rich possibilities for serious comedy, and there is a long succession in literature of "holy fools."  In Jewish literature, the theme goes back at least to Job (whose friend's think he has gone off the deep end, and end up counseling him to "curse God and die").  For Christians, the pre-eminent example will of course be Christ and, naturally, his genuine followers, the saints.  There is a derivative secular (or quasi-secular) tradition, starring such figures as the heroes of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Melville's Billy Budd, and Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Sezchuan.

• The Judeo-Christian tradition's interest in the "holy fool" theme is not limited to the ethical question of whether it is better to look out for oneself, in a world in which not winning means losing, or to live for others, and to work for a world in which either there is no winning at the expense of others.  It insists on grounding these ethical issues in a larger context of faith in God's Word, and on maintaining that this God does not reveal himself except to faith.  That is, we are told, we are to believe what God says (the Bible as divine revelation, not a product of human origin), and to be loyal to God's commands (the Bible as a source of authoritative moral injunctions about what must be done to be saved).

But the issues here are unsettling:  it seems to many (believers and unbelievers alike) that human beings are required to go beyond the evidence afforded by natural reason and the experience afforded by the natural senses - even that faith must even affirm counter to what this natural evidence seems to indicate. 

• Why, for instance, didn't God show up to stop the slaughter of innocents during the Holocaust?  After all, in the world, sun and rain fall on the just and unjust alike. (This is not even to speak of the suffering undergone by non-human animals in the course of time - at the hands of humans, in the winter cold, in lingering disease, under the gnawing of parasites.)  And the universe as revealed by modern astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology doesn't seem to center on the grain of sand that human beings appear to have evolved upon.

• Further, this faith seems both too easy to be respectable (isn't it childish not to face up to death as final?) and too hard (doesn't the God revealed in the Bible seem tied to superstitious and primitive cultures? doesn't God insist on things that are ridiculous and pointless as well as those that are morally sensical, but known outside the Bible anyway?)

• Is it not true that faith can be misplaced, and with disastrous consequences?  After all, isn't that what we mean by fanaticism?  Aren't there such things as religious dictatorships? Is it true that sheer passionate conviction guarantees the truth of the content of what one so passionately believes?  (Suppose we grant that some terrorist actions are heroic, even imperative.  Even so, could we grant that all religiously motivated suicide bombings, say, are morally sublime?)  Can't faith be blind?  And if it is going to be called out independently of any criteria grounded in reason and experience, can it be otherwise than blind?

• Besides, simple people (among whom are numbered many of the most famous "holy fools") often don't know the Scriptures in any careful detail.  So is it really necessary to study them?

These remarks you will recognize as the voice of one kind of common sense in our own day.  And it will not escape you that, if they strike us as more convincing than (say) the common sense of other times and places, that may be in part because it is the particular common sense that we ourselves happen to have been brought up in.  (On the other hand, perhaps progress of some limited sort is possible, and more than simple ethnocentrism is at stake.)

• In any case, these remarks should help to remind us of how powerful (properly convincing? merely seductive?) "common sense" can be.  At the same time, we want to remain open to the possibility that many of the elements of what passes with us for common sense - particularly in the ethical and political domains - may be deranged.  (Indeed, it is likely that "common sense" taken as a whole, in any one "moment" (or "era"), is simply incoherent:  that it includes all sorts of things that, logically, do not fit with each other, and deserved, on the basis of reason alone, to be winnowed and sifted.)

Singer is writing in our age, so the "common sense" his story invites us to interrogate may be more complicated than just the particular common sense that prevails in the world "of" the story.  Put another way, the world in which Gimpel lives extends beyond Frampol to the larger world into which he wanders at the end - and this world extends, indeterminately, into "our own."  

The story thus interrogates us:  How far, then, do we want to accompany Gimpel? 

This is something of course that each must answer for himself or herself.  But whether we get an answer that's worth the search will depend on how seriously we are willing to carry through that search.

Here, then, are a few specific curiosities you might take over for the purposes of your third reading.

(1)  Is Gimpel's foolishness to be regarded as a form of mental retardation?

• To get clear on this, we'll need to examine his thinking in specific instances.

  Consider also what we learn in ¶35 of Part III of the story.  Is Gimpel incapable of conducting practical affairs? (What is the significance, too, for our appreciation of Gimpel's character, of the fact that until now he forgot to mention this fact to us?)

(2)  Look carefully at the case made by the Evil One at the beginning of Part IV of the story.

• Can you break down into distinct elements the different parts of the Evil One's case?
  • Some of them are descriptions - representations of "what is" [including "what isn't"]. 
  • Others are prescriptions - representations of "what should be" [including "what shouldn't be" and "what is permissible"].

    How are we to appreciate their supposed connections with each other?

    • Do the purported grounds actually entail the conclusions urged?  Or do we have a non-sequitur?
    • Do you detect anything actually self-contradictory in the overall view the Evil One communicates?

  Review carefully the skeptical points laid out above (the bulleted points in purple).  How far does the counsel of the Evil One square with this "common sense"?  Could one affirm this "common sense" and consistently reject the ethical outlook expressed by the Evil One?  

  • Consider what Singer himself says in his "Author's Note on His Collected Short Stories":  "I dreamed of a humanism and ethics the basis of which would be a refusal to justify all the evils the Almighty has sent us and is preparing to bestow upon us in the future" (¶4 in our edition). 
    • Has Singer in your view moved beyond this position, in his story "Gimpel the Fool" -- or is the story best viewed as an expression of it? 

    In the same note, Singer goes on to say:  "At its best, art can be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while."

    • What do you figure would be some of the prominent historical events that Singer would designate if a child were to ask him what he meant by "the human disaster"?
    • Does Gimpel, at the end, reach some sort of equivalent of this view, if we are to judge by the attitude he takes towards fantasy (dreaming) and fiction (story-telling)?

(3)  What are we to make of some of the things Gimpel believes in after he leaves Frampol?  What are we to think of the material in ¶s 25, 27, and 28 of the story's final section (IV)?  Do you think Singer expects us to share his belief in these kinds of states of affairs?

• "[T]he longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies."  Does it then make no difference whether one lies or tells the truth?  (Is this what he means when he says, "What difference can it make?"  Or is he there talking about something else?).
• What are we to make of his visions of Elka?  Are we to take them as registerings of what in the story are realities?  Are we to take them as hallucinations (self-foolings, deceptions more profound than those by which his neighbors used to subject him), motivated by wish?  Does it make any difference?  (Perhaps the point lies rather in the quality of the wish:  but what would this mean?) .
• Look at the final sentence of the story.  It states a belief.  Does it make any difference whether it is a true one?  (Does it make any difference, for what you take to be the theme of the story, whether Gimpel is deceived on just this point?)

  Go to the Writing Assignment on this work.

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

   Contents copyright © 1999 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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  This page last updated 27 July 2000.