Role of female characters in Fidelman's Epiphany in Nu nuThe number of words includes an overviewThesis: In his picturesque short story "Le nu nu", Bernard Malamud uses female characters to develop, dramatize and resolve Fidelman's epiphany and bring the protagonist to the final, artistic understanding of himself. Bernard Malamud, a leading contemporary Jewish author, oscillates between fantasy and reality in his almost allegorical short fiction, teaching the reader a lesson through coinciding elements of beauty and comedy. Moving away from his usual inner-city Jewish element, Malamud takes on new challenges of subject and setting in his novelistic collection of short stories, Pictures of Fidelman Malamud develops his protagonist through a series of six interrelated short works, each of which can operate completely independently of others. In "The Naked Nude", for example, Fidelman reaches a new artistic maturity by attempting to copy the famous painting "Venus of Urbino" by Titian Tiziano. Malamud's recurring theme, self-knowledge through suffering, permeates this short work. Scarpio and Angelo, as the main antagonists, provide the bulk of this suffering for Fidelman. However, it was his own mental captivity regarding the female nude that gave rise to Fidelman's eventual revelation as an artist and as an individual. Her relationship with the women in the work shapes her ability to capture the form of “Venus” and realize her own worth. In "The Naked Nude", Bernard Malamud uses the female characters to develop, dramatize and resolve Fidelman's epiphany and to bring the protagonist to a final and artistic understanding of self. At the beginning of the story, Fidelman is forced to act as janitor and servant to a group of ill-bred prostitutes serving the padrone, Angelo. These offending characters constitute the first in a series of mental obstacles in the imprisoned protagonist's attempt to copy Titian's nude. They torment Fidelman with cynical laughter and exploit his humiliating position. His sexual insecurity is established early in the story when he reflects on his violent guillotine skit, asking "A man's head or his penis?...in either case, a terrible wound" (Malamud 318). The omniscient and limited narrator, revealing Fidelman's thoughts and feelings, also suggests that he could not take inspiration from "the whores" and that "maybe there were too many naked women around him, which made it impossible to draw a nude” (Malamud 325). This illustrates Fidelman's early acknowledgment of his artistic helplessness to desensitization. However, he soon realizes that the way he perceives "Venus" also interrupts his progress...