The Fixer Research Paper

The Fantasy World of The Fixer

In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, almost all of Yakov Bok's time is spent in prison. The Fixer is an examination of freedom and its compliment, commitment (Helterman 67 ). Though Bok has no physical freedom, the longer that he is imprisoned, the more true freedom he obtains. Bok is able to attain this freedom through his dreams and hallucinations. These sequences are important because they prevent the story from becoming static, but more important, they illustrate that true freedom lies within one's self.

Yakov Bok is tortured in the government's attempt to obtain his confession to the ritual murder of Zhenia Golov. He is poisoned, strip searched, chained, and nearly frozen to death:

The fixer was chained to the wall all day,and at night he lay on the bedplank, his legs locked in the stocks...the leg holes were tight and chafed his flesh if he tried to turn a little...the straw mattress had been removed from his cell...now in chains, he thought the searches of his body might end but they increased to six a day, three in the morning and three in the afternoon.( 236 )

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After Bibikov's death, Bok hallucinates a conversation with his old friend. In this hallucination Bibikov tells Bok that "the purpose of freedom is to create it for others" ( 336 ). This event again illustrates that Bok's hallucinations are important to his discovering an inner freedom. Bok holds this statement especially dear because of the fact that it comes, although in a dream, from someone he trusted and believed in. Bok now realizes that his freedom is not the important issue. It is the freedom of those who will come after him that really matters. Realizing that his freedom is not important strangely gives Bok a greater sense of freedom. He now knows what the purpose of his life must be: Bok must be a martyr for his people, the very people that he had tried to