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Analysis
In this story Malamud shifts his focus from Jews to Italians. There is nothing particularly racial in this story save perhaps the fact that Italians are of relatively recent arrival in the U.S. and the American dream of freedom and riches is still strongly alive in them. Tommy first thought he had a chance to realize the American dream fast by joining a group of teenagers with fast cares, fast girls, and ready money, but he just barely managed to escape being jailed. Later he joined his uncle in illegal fishing, enjoyed the fun, but now his uncle is serving a term in prison.
After roaming in vast Texas looking for another chance, he comes back home defeated and find himself, at only 29, a prisoner in his own store: “You could never see the sky outside or the ocean because you were in a prison, except nobody called it a prison …” He idles from morning till 11 P.M., unable to get out except for a lonely movie once a week, still keeping a little hope alive by breaking the law－punchboards and slot machines.
What makes Tommy a pathetic figure is the intensity of his awareness, his strong feeling of being trapped. “All the present trouble,” he thinks, started when he joined in with the teenage gang which led “to the holdup of a liquor store.” Although he was not caught in the police raid against slot machines, “he felt bad about the machine for a long time.”
When he catches the little girl stealing, he sees an image of himself in her, and she awakes paternal feelings of protection in him, intensified by his own childlessness. He wants to save her from his own fate, his own loss of freedom and opportunity, to the point of striking his own wife in order to protect the little thief. His life would not be all vain if he could protect someone from committing his own mistakes. But the child, by sticking out her tongue at him, refuses his paternity and deepens his sense of failure.
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