ATDTDA (12): A visitor from quite far away, 337-343 #1

[Paul Nightingale]

On the vegetarian restaurant, cf. Reef to Frank when they arrive in
Nochecita: "You might like it, Francisco, why there's a church, a
schoolhouse, any number of those back-east vegetarian restaurants." (200)
However, we never actually get to see a vegetarian restaurant in Nochecita.
For whatever reason, Reef connects church and schoolhouse, signifiers of the
small town community, and tradition, to restaurants that are used here to
signify a kind of modernity; and in the current section that connection is
made also.


Cf. the image of the slaughterhouse, which pre-empts everything when the
novel first arrives, in the company of the Chums, in Chicago: from ". the
smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality" down to ". the
killing-floor" (10), an exemplar of capitalist rationalisation.
Subsequently, Professor Vanderjuice refers to the stockyards as "where the
Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to
live on it and by it" (53).