SOURCE: "'The Magic Barrel': Bernard Malamud, 1914–," in his Prefaces to The Experience of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979, pp. 170-74.

An esteemed American critic and literary historian, Trilling was also an essayist, editor, and novelist. In the following essay, which was originally published in 1967 in his The Experience of Literature as a preface to "The Magic Barrel," Trilling analyzes the symbolic meaning of the rendezvous between Finkle and Stella in the story.

Much of the curious power and charm of "The Magic Barrel" is surely to be accounted for by the extraordinary visual intensity of a single paragraph, the last but one, which describes the rendezvous of Leo Finkle and Stella Salzman. The glare of the street lamp under which Stella stands, her white dress and red shoes, and also the red dress and white shoes that Leo had expected her to wear (for this too is envisioned), the...