In this Blog i will be summarizing and anaylzing "A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun" pages 263-390. In the begining of this section Smith was released from prison again and is starting to go into the "heavy" again. He starts off by joining an armed robbery firm, named the little firm. Their jobs consist of hits on grocery stores and the occansional bank. We can see that Smith is comfortable with this because he has a significant amount of money and he can live with his family. He doesn't get into drugs like many of his friends but instead craves the thrill of holding a gun to the cashier, " I never got hooked on skunk, i guess because my fix was the thrill of robbing" (smith 310). Smith clearly knows that he does burgalery not because he has to but because he enjoys the life it produces in him. Smith and the firm do odd jobs and on one of their jobs they were hitting a grocery store and wearing the employees clothing. when the silent alarm hit and they ran away a cashier tried to follow them thinking that they were actual employees. when they turned around and opened fire on him the cashier quickly realizes that they are not real employees. The fact that the little firm opened up on him also depicts the image that smith and his activities have lost the innocence that they once had. Later in the story he gets involved as "muscle" the leader of the little firm, terry. He gets involved in a gunshoot out and is forced to use his gun for the first time against a person. These actions compiled with an assortment of others tell readers that Smith is officialy a man lost in the fires of crime. However later in this segment he is jailed for his activities and sent to the standard crime center. He wittnesses 7 men attempt a mass escape. They try to steal a steam roller and burst out. They manage to get the roller however they do not know how to operate it and are stranded and recieve a brutal beating.
Right after Smith sees this he attempts to try to start a riot and goes after one of the gaurds, but no-one follows him and the screws get their way with him. When he is put into solitary he is unsure whether he will survive the beating because others like him have died from beatings like the one he is recieving. When he is left in the room he feels dead, but he manages to hang on. He recovers from his wounds while in solitary but he starts to think about his life more carefully. He realizes that crime is not the way to go and his whole life has been wasted by simple addictions, "If i could go back and redo my whole life i would have choosen to enter the proffesion of literature" (347). This is the major turning point in smith's moral choices and after being released from solitary he starts a prison newspaper and gets a weekly column in a london paper, (which he writes while in jail). Shortly afterwards the prison he is at gets a new governor and the old one is promoted. The new governor shuts down smith's paper but cannot stop him from writing his columns, (by now he has recieved a hodgepodge of jobs). Then devastating news comes, his son was hanged by unknown culprits.
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3 comments:
A little hit firm? Wow. Thats intricate. It also says a lot about this Smith character. Maybe it isn't coincidence that a great crime name is "smith" because these books are real. A strong false sense of security and a suit case of wits need to be kept to fly under the radar and work for something like that. Though this is also an effect of democracy, there are winners and losers. Since Smith is a loser he must cheat to win.
For my outside reading this quarter I am reading A Million Little Pieces, a story about drug and alcohol addiction. Reading this makes me glad that Smith never became addicted to drugs, because I think it would have just further complicated his problems. I can't personally relate to the thrill of robbing, but I can relate to the thrill of adrenaline, which I believe one would get off of robbing. The risk and danger combined with the payoff would be thrilling, in a bad way, and that thrill could be addiction. Not reading the book I cannot say anything for sure, but based off of the blog posts I think that Smith went back to crime because it was the main thing he knew. It was how he knew how to make a good living. I'm glad he has started his column and gotten into that good habit, but I wonder if his son's death will change that.
Turns out his life sucks. First he goes to jail for robbery, goes to jail, and then his kid gets lynched. Good thing he wasn't doing drugs during all of this. This shows that with some situations, once you get in, you can't get out. Hopefully, his sons death will change things for the better, if he doesn't get killed first.
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