What about Nick? Did you like him/feel for him? Do you think the horribly racist stuff Frank and Cora said about him was just supposed to be "typical of the time" or did you get the feeling it was supposed to reflect especially poorly on Frank's and Cora's characters?
I thought the author was more guilty of the racism, laying it on thick about the flashy Greek/American patriotism and the signs and the scents and flashy clothes, that he built a stereotype of a cuckold we were never supposed to like.
ReplyDeleteAnd again, per the conventions of the time, that people would be more sensitive about marrying different ethnicities, and for Cora from Iowa that this would have been drilled into her.
Nick seemed kind and trusting, and a little vainglorious, like building a scrapbook after his accident. A big manchild. I guess I mostly just felt sorry for him.
Right on, cl - I felt sorry for him too. He seemed so clueless and far too trusting.
ReplyDeleteAnd the way Frank reacted at his funeral - "I got to blubbering while they were letting him down. Singing those hymns will do it to you every time, and specially when it's about a guy you like as well as I liked the Greek ..." that was ironically the time when I felt the most sympathetically toward Frank.
Shanxi, you know what's funny about that is that was the first time, I think, that he said he liked the guy. Like he appreciated him post-death. Although he had commented repeatedly on the beautiful voice.
ReplyDeleteOh, that reminds me. That death scene was so chilling -- when he called out, they kill him, and his voice echos back. So intense!
Yeah, poor Nick. Right, Shanxi, he was so trusting of Frank and Cora. He never even suspected there was anything going on between them.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not like he treated Cora badly or anything. His only fault was not being Cora's fantasy man. He certainly didn't deserve his fate.
Yes, cl, the death scene! That was amazing, the echo! It's almost the sort of thing you'd find in Poe, except in Poe the echo would play over and over again in the killer's mind until he confessed or something. The cat motif also felt sort of Poe-ish — the idea that a "dumb animal" played such a large role in Frank getting caught (the cat shorting out the electricity and drawing the cop's attention and then the role played by the big cats in the end).
ReplyDeleteNick didn't treat Cora badly, but I sort of felt like he took her for granted, like she was a pretty bargain that he picked up cheaply. I didn't like how he was ordering her to get more potatoes for Frank! But then I suppose that was just the way of the world in the 1930s: Men ordered their wives around like domestic servants. Cl, I like your description of him as "vainglorious." That's so fitting. I agree he didn't deserve his fate, but it would be a really different book if he were awful and we were all actually rooting for him to be deleted. I mean, that would put Frank and Cora in a different light, I think.
It definitely would be a different book. I thought about that, too. I think in most of the off-your-spouse stories I've read, the spouse was pretty unlikable and I didn't feel too sorry for him. Making Nick more sympathetic and sort of childlike had to have been a deliberate decision on Cain's part. I agree he didn't show much appreciation for Cora, but the feeling was mutual so I guess it didn't bother me that much.
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