Bathroom Economics
The narrator provides a lesson in economic class division in America through the imagery of bathroom conditions on planes, trains and buses. These three modes of transportation are symbolic representatives of class distinction by virtue of expense: planes tickets cannot be afforded by all Americans whereas all Americans have access to buses while only the lowest run are forced to use them. Trains, of course represent the middle class:
“The sanitary accommodations, both in the airport and on board the plane, are almost invariably clean…Most significantly, the faucets turn. The sinks drain. The johns flush. And if they do not, they are speedily repaired.”
“sanitary accommodations associated with rail travel are somewhat less civilized…there is usually only one central rest room for each sex, that one poorly attended…the wise traveler checks for towels before he wets his hands”
“[the bus toilet] is merely a seat atop a square metal holding tank; below it the curious traveler may observe the wastes of previous users swimming blissfully about like so many tropical fish.”
Cooking with Gaps
The narrator admits that when it comes to those gaps in the life stories of the celebrities of history, time usually does an efficient job of filling things in. There is little mystery left to the most famous lives of civilization. But when it comes to the lesser known, those gaps are not just subject to remaining empty, but becomes prone to being filled in by something less than the truth. He brilliantly couches this concept within cooking imagery:
“the gaps in the stories of the unknown are never filled…some poor unimaginative fool, calling himself a historian but really only a frustrated novelist, comes along and tries to put it all together. And fails. And so, like a poor cook trying to salvage a culinary disaster, he peppers his report with deceptive phrases…when he is fairly sure but has no evidence, `clearly’ and `almost certainly’ when he has no idea at all, and salts it with obscure references and then he pretends…that the seasoned mess is Chateaubriand instead of turkey hash.”
Old Jack
The author uses imagery to tremendous effect in serving the purpose of delineating character. The characters are eccentric and offbeat to begin with, but this aspect is apprehended not as a result of the narrator telling the reader, but through an accumulation of descriptive literary techniques which facilitate the building of an image of the character in the reader’s mind. Such as, for example, the loquacious quality of Old Jack:
“His patter was a bizarre mishmash of aphorism and jive, witticism and wisecrack. He had `once heard’ almost everything: that willow bark cured headaches; that milk was bad for babies; that whiskey, taken in seemly moderation, aided the digestion, prolonged life, and cleared the wandering minds of older folk. He spun out endless webs of tales that were either true or so blatantly false as to seem true”
Not the Heat, the Morbidity
The circumstances of communal rituals of grieving and bereavement in the stifling heat of the pre-air conditioner era is made viscerally palpable through imagery. The author paints such a vivid picture of the unpleasant reality of this overly familiar rite that one need not even have ever experienced anything similar to almost start sweating and wrinkling their nose as they are reading it:
“In the depths of the house, the heat was even worse: like oil, stubbornly refusing to circulate despite the almost frantic motion of two dozen paper fans thoughtfully donated by the Mordecai D. Johnson Funeral Home of Altoona, Pa., and expertly wielded by the ladies of the Women’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society—middle-aged women of various shapes, sizes, and shades…Many of the people left quickly, knowing that although the heat was everywhere they could at least escape the odor of dying flowers mingled with two dozen variations on the theme of cheap perfume that hung in Moses Washington’s house like a fog."
