By all accounts, “The Street of Crocodiles” is not appealing for it is characteristically dubious: “ The old established inhabitants of the city kept away from that areas where the scum, the lowest orders had settled-creatures without character, without background, moral dregs, the inferior species of human being which is born in such ephemeral communities…The best among them were not entirely free from the temptation of voluntary degradation, of breaking down the barriers of hierarchy, of immersion in that shallow mud of companionship, of easy intimacy, of dirty intermingling. The District was an El Dorado of such moral deserters.” “ The established inhabitants” comprise those in an advanced social rank who would endure without the district. Resolutions to circumvent the district render it a locale where one would be quickly drawn to indulge in the depravities that are overriding there. Going to the region is comparable to falling for the allurement of dishonesty. The satirical ‘El Dorado’ infers that the district is opulent with decadence; hence, being there is equivalent to sponsoring its affluence.
The district’s physical arrangement echoes the facets of its moral corrosion: “Only a few people noticed the peculiar characteristics of that district; the fatal lack of color, as if that shoddy , quickly growing areas could not afford the luxury of it. Everything was gray there, as in black-and-white photographs or in cheap illustrated catalogues. This similarity was real rather than metaphorical because at times, when wandering in those parts, one in fact gained the impression that one was turning the pages of a prospect, looking at columns of boring commercial advertisements, among which suspect announcements nestled like parasites, together with dubious notices and illustrations with a double meaning. And one’s wandering proved as sterile and pointless as the excitement produced by a close study of pornographic albums.” The district’s tawdriness reflects the imprecision that favours the thriving of substandard tendencies which the fatalistic color typifies. Grayness echoes the dubiousness of the undertakings in the city which do not endorse ethics. The imagery of the incredible commercial adverts alludes to the economic dishonesties that sponsor undeserved trade transactions with customers who may not be cognizant of the traders’ decadent intents. Advertisements exemplify the omnipresence duplicity in the district for their connotations are unequivocal. ‘Pornographic albums’ are emblems of prospering sexual decadence in the city.
“Cockroaches”
The cockroaches are exhibitions of an extreme psychotic indisposition; “I remember the invasion of cockroaches, the black swarm which had nightly filled the darkness with a spidery running. All cracks in the floors were full of moving whispers, each crevice suddenly produced a cockroach, from every chink would shoot a crazy black zigzag of lightning. Ah, that wild lunacy of panic, traced in a shiny black line on the floor! Ah, those screams of horror which my father emitted.” The narrator’s commemorations emulate a convincing invasion of deadly cockroaches; however, psychoanalytically, the cockroaches are hallucinations of the narrator’s father’s which are in the unconscious. The father’s panic bouts persuade the narrator that the cockroaches are authentic. The prevalent blackness hints at the extremeness of the alarm relating to the cockroaches which unquestionably perplexed the narrator’s father.
Unconsciously, the father is disproportionately petrified of cockroaches. If the hint of lunacy were non-present, then the expressions of the cockroaches would have been construed to be tangible: “Father’s behaviour changed. His madness, the euphoria of his excitement wore off. In his gestures and expressions signs of a bad conscience began to show. He took to avoiding us. He hid, for days on end, in corners, in wardrobes, under the eiderdowns. I saw him sometimes looking pensively at his own hands, examining the consistency of skin and nails , on which black spots began to a paper like the scales of a cockroach.” Here, the father transmogrifies into a conventional cockroach. This weird transmutation is emblematical of the Imaginary Order which would delude him that he would buffer himself from the professed imagery cockroach assaults because the cockroaches will distinguish him as one of them. The father’s Real bears life-threatening trauma which is accredited to his superfluous fixation. Emulating the cockroaches is a psychological comeback of sheltering himself from the perturbing outbreaks that he weathers unconsciously.
