User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions
Completed 2 paragraphs |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 57: | Line 57: | ||
‘It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously. ‘I’ll bust him.’. . . . . . . . . . . ‘All you kids are tough.’‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.‘That’s what I said.’ (131) | ‘It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously. ‘I’ll bust him.’. . . . . . . . . . . ‘All you kids are tough.’‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.‘That’s what I said.’ (131) | ||
Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light | |||