Metropolitan Depravity - “The Street of Crocodiles”
The title “The Street of Crocodiles” hints at prevalent fraud: the crocodiles signify the dissolute goings-ons which annihilate decency: “The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. We were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s mouldering newspapers… Over the whole area there floats the lazy licentious smell of sin, and the houses, the shops, the people seem sometimes no more than a shiver of its feverish body, the gooseflesh of its febrile dreams.” Modernization endorses the enormous corruption in the street, which makes the city antipathetic toward ethical approaches. The ‘smell of sin’ suggests that the proclivity of indulging in wickedness is extraordinary in the street which renders it a bountiful ground for fraud to flourish.
Insanity - “Cockroaches”
The narrator’s father is a fatality of mental delusions with fast-track his craziness: “ Adela’s tales or whether I had witnessed them myself. My father at the time no longer possessed that power of resistance which protects healthy people from the fascination of loathing. Instead of fighting against the terrible attraction of that fascination, my father, a prey to madness, became completely subject to it.” The advancement of the insanity renders the narrator’s father mentally- unhealthy for he would not astound his bizarre preoccupation with cockroaches. The visualizations of the cockroaches endow the father’s rowdiness which is evident when “With a wild scream he would suddenly jump up from his seat, run blindly to a corner of the room and stab downward with the javelin, then lift it, having impaled an enormous cockroach that desperately wriggled its tangle of legs.”
The father’s lunacy is ascribed to the eerie cockroach-related paranoia. His endeavors to execute the cockroaches using a javelin indicate that he regards the invented cockroaches perils to his endurance. Cockroaches are typically disagreeable, but they are anodyne insects that would not necessitate a sophisticated armament to annihilate them; accordingly, the gratuitous dread of the cockroaches is a sign that such dread was a psychological production.
