Duddy Kravitz

Meredith Snyder

"I think you're rotten," says Yvette at the end of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, "I wish you were dead" (Richler 318). This sentiment is echoed throughout a substantial amount of the criticism of Mordecai Richler's tale. At best, we question whether Duddy has learned anything during his apprenticeship; at worst, we accuse him of taking a tremendous step backwards, of becoming an utterly contemptible human being. When Duddy steals money from his friend and admirer, Virgil, to pay for the final parcel of land around Lac St. Pierre, it may seem that he has sunk to a low from which he may never recover; but careful consideration of the events leading up to the theft, the turn of events after it, and finally, Duddy's emotional reaction to both Yvette's anger and Simcha's disappointment indicates that Duddy is not the monster that he is frequently made out to be.

Duddy Kravitz is raised in a poor part of Montreal; people without hope are common, and, often, it is necessary to stoop below one's standards, just to make a living. Max Kravitz, for example, who has a respectable job as a taxi driver, also works as a pimp, to make ends meet. Duddy Kravitz grows up idolizing Jerry Dingleman, the "Boy Wonder" who, according to Max's stories, is someone who has been able to fight his way out of the St. Urbain St. squalor, and become a success. The oral legends Max tells of his accomplishments, of his humble beginnings, and his slow rise to greatness recall heroic epics like The Odyssey, told in ancient Greece to educate and inspire the youth of a warrior culture. "When the Boy Wonder loses his temper," Max tells Duddy, "he could eat bread and it would come out toasted. That's the size of it" (62). This is an obvious hyperbole; in every way, Max's legends make the Boy Wonder larger than life. The force of Max's storytelling teaches Duddy that the Boy Wonder is someone to be emulated. In "Duddy Kravitz, from Apprentice to Legend," Grant McGregor describes Duddy's life as "apprenticeship to a perverted myth" (McGregor 133), and in many ways this is true. Although he presents an image of success, and Max Kravitz's tales make him out to be the ultimate accomplished businessman, Jerry Dingleman is a corrupt, cruel person. For his entire life, Duddy has been told that he will never succeed, but he is resilient. With the Boy Wonder as his example, Duddy intends to prove everyone wrong. "He liked to think, in fact, that point for point he was a lot like the Boy Wonder before he had made his name" (62). The audience is made aware, fairly early on, that the Boy Wonder is a crook, but this information eludes Duddy until far into the story, when Duddy has already achieved some measure of success by his own means, part of it by the trickery he mastered during his high school years, but now that he has matured quite a bit, also by sheer hard work.

Duddy fights a continual uphill battle for success; he wants to be someone of whom his father is proud, like his brother Lennie, or the Boy Wonder himself. To Irwin Shubert and the other waiters at Rubin's Hotel Lac des Sables in Ste. Agathe des Monts, "There [was] nothing that little fiend wouldn't do for a dollar" (77), but Duddy was interested in success even more than money, not for the sheer material joy of it, but because of his need to feel the love and admiration of his father, who has always seen his son as "a dope like me" (23). Although he relates himself to Duddy, he feels far greater affection for the successful people in his life than for his younger son, in whom he can see the personification of his own character flaws. Max Kravitz offers little support to his younger son, so Duddy must build a place for himself in life on his own. The impression of Duddy as an incurable prankster, the leader of a raggle-taggle gang of marauding boys with no heart, is countered in his interactions with his brother, Lennie, when we are exposed to Duddy's weakness: this very desire for his family's love and attention. In Part I, Chapter 3, Duddy greets his brother at the end of the day, only to be met with, "how many times have I asked you not to barge in here when I'm studying?" (21). His attempts at conversation are repeatedly rebuffed. His need for his family's approval arises again later on: "Duddy was tempted to ask his father if Minnie had liked him, but he couldn't bring himself to risk it" (129). He needs to know his mother loved him, but he is afraid of losing face in his father's eyes. This driving force behind Duddy's ambition does inspire great sympathy.

A significant part of readers' contempt for Duddy Kravitz arises because we tend to hold him to a much higher standard than the other characters. J.A. Wainwright, in "Neither Jekyll nor Hyde: In Defence of Duddy Kravitz," talks at length about the relationship between Duddy and Irwin Shubert and how we are inclined to align ourselves in the clash: "our sympathies lie with Duddy because his crudities are preferable to Irwin's nastiness and snobbery" (Wainwright 60). Duddy may be a prankster, but he isn't nasty. Even his pranks at FFHS tended to be either retaliatory, or with the idea of a good joke in mind. When Duddy turns on Mr. MacPherson, it is in response to the comment the teacher made about his father: "You said my father wasn't fit to bring me up. I've got witnesses. That's an insult to my family, Sir" (14). Mr. MacPherson has attacked one of the things Duddy values most: his family. This is in no way to suggest that the death of his wife was appropriate punishment; Duddy did not intend to be anything more than a bit of a nuisance. The boys of room forty-one got vengeance against all of their foes with similarly petty pranks. Mr. MacPherson, with his invalid wife and his crumbling ideals, was simply an easy target.

In his essay, Wainwright says, "Simcha is the man whom Duddy will supposedly betray (at the end of the novel) along with Virgil and Yvette," then continues with the question, "How much, we might well ask, does Simcha betray Duddy?" (Wainwright 59). The reader is so tied up anticipating Duddy's success that the weakness of the platitude upon which rest all his ambitions is forgotten. This is the wisest piece of advice anyone has ever given Duddy; it carries enough weight with him that it takes quite some time for him to realise how hollow it really is. One of Duddy's earlier memories is of Simcha complaining about his family:

'Your grandfather was a failure in this country,' he