Summary
After the rabbi tells Gimpel he can go back to Elka, Gimpel goes back to the bakery until the evening before packing up some bread and going home. When he gets there, he sees his own apprentice in bed with Elka. Elka wakes up and asks Gimpel to check on the goat outside because she might be sick. Gimpel does so, and when he returns, he notices that the apprentice has disappeared. When he asks Elka where he went, she tells Gimpel he is once again hallucinating.
Gimpel confronts the apprentice the next day. He also tells Gimpel he thinks he should see a doctor because he was never with Elka. Jumping forward in time, Gimpel says that he and Elka spent twenty years together and had six children. At the end of her life, Elka confesses that none of the children were his.
One evening after Elka's death, Gimpel is visited by an evil spirit. The spirit convinces him to take revenge on the town by baking urine into the bread at the bakery. However, before the bread is put out for sale, Gimpel decides to bury it in the ground instead. He returns home, divides his large fortune among his children, and leaves Frampol for good.
In his old age, Gimpel travels the world as a beggar and storyteller. He believes that all things are possible and that there is really no such thing as a lie. Gimpel looks toward death with hope, as he believes that death is the only form of truth.
Analysis
While the influence of religion has been present in the periphery of the story until this point, it begins to play a bigger role in Gimpel's life as he contends with aging and death. After Elka's confession and subsequent death, Gimpel becomes temporarily possessed by an evil spirit who encourages him to seek revenge on the people of Frampol. While Gimpel initially listens to the spirit, he eventually decides to bury the contaminated bread in the ground after remembering a vision he had of Elka after her death. "You fool!" Elka says to him, "Because I was false is everything false too? I never deceived anyone but myself. I'm paying for it all, Gimpel. They spare you nothing here" (1002). The implication here is that Elka has gone to Hell and is suffering for her deception. It is this knowledge – that "A false step now and I'd lose Eternal Life" (1002) – that leads Gimpel to forget about revenge on the townspeople and leave Frampol for good. Here, the moral instruction of religion – specifically Judaism, as practiced by everyone in the town – keeps Gimpel from jeopardizing his afterlife. The story here introduces another challenge to the reader: it encourages them to question whether the religious reasons behind Gimpel's behavior only contribute to his foolishness (thereby rendering religious belief itself foolish), or whether God serves as the only stable, albeit unknown, sense of truth in the world.
Gimpel himself chooses the latter path, ultimately freeing himself from the ridicule of Frampol and choosing to travel the world as a beggar and, notably, a storyteller. This pursuit of Gimpel's suggests that he is simultaneously liberating himself from others' expectations of his foolishness and embracing that foolishness as a necessary part of life. "The longer I lived," he says upon reflection, "the more I understood that there were really no lies. What doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year" (1002). Here, Gimpel suggests that the notion of foolishness is only an artificial means of cruelty, as belief is essential for living in a surprising and unpredictable world. This perspective leads Gimpel to his final conclusion, that life itself is full of improbability and possibility, while death is the only phenomenon that can bring one to absolute truth.
