Time & Perspective Quote by Bernard Malamud

Urgency is the engine here, but Malamud dresses it in carpentry. Doors and windows are the civilized myth of progress: the idea that the world is built with appropriate entrances for whoever needs them. His line is a fable about what happens when that myth collapses. If there is no sanctioned way through, a person either accepts confinement or invents a breach. The wall is not just an obstacle; it is the accumulated architecture of rules, class, prejudice, bureaucracy, bad luck - the blunt fact that many lives aren’t designed with convenient exits.

Malamud’s intent isn’t superhero bravado so much as moral pressure. “There comes a time” frames desperation as inevitable, not optional. The sentence pushes you toward a point where patience becomes complicity and endurance turns into self-erasure. “A man’s life” is doing mid-century work: the traditional bildungsroman assumption that adulthood is measured by agency, provision, and forward motion. Yet the image quietly questions that tradition. If the only way to “get where he has to go” is violence against the barrier, what does that say about the society that built it?

Context matters: Malamud wrote in a postwar America that sold mobility as a birthright while keeping plenty of people outside the house. In his fiction, characters often face systems that demand both decency and cunning. Walking through a wall is less a celebration of force than a grim acknowledgment that sometimes survival requires transgression - and that the cost of being “good” may be getting stuck.