ATDTDA (13): Reef's dead, 362-364

[Paul Nightingale]

I'm not sure what is idiosyncratic about class consciousness, whether or not
you choose to live your life by it. The passage in question distinguishes
between "undeniably evil hombres" and "those who took care of their problems
for them": those in the second category are evidently not themselves plutes,
but only "saloon bum[s] in their palace o' wealth". You might or might not
include Foley Walker here; it depends how far up the tree you wish to climb,
how far you want to describe his situation as a contradictory class
location. Either way, he doesn't belong with the hired guns, with Deuce or
with Burgess respectively (and one might say the "ignorance" of the latter,
as a functionary of state power, is greater than that of the former).

We might decide that Reef is an unreliable witness, although that implies he
is being offered as a mouthpiece for a particular pov, which I don't think
is the case; and neither do I think it's the function of the novel (or any
of its characters) to be authoritative, if by that we mean some kind of
final word on the matter.

In the opening lines of this section Reef offers himself as a kind of victim
deprived of "a regular life like everybody else". How do we unpack this
simple statement? Is a regular life the right of all, and only Reef has had
to go without because he is caught up in a messy business inherited from his
pa? Or is a regular life what most are denied, and this realisation has had
to dawn on him slowly as he gains experience as an activist? And what is a
regular life anyway? Is it based on the American Dream, and therefore a
bourgeois model? None of these questions are answered, it seems to me; but
neither are they asked in quite so rhetorical a manner.