Sam and Antonello agreed to meet for a drink at the Vic. When Antonello arrived, Sam was already sitting at a table not the bar; on the table, on his side there was beer, on Antonello’s side a glass of red wine. Sam was bald, what was left of his hair, a rim of short hair, was flecked with grey. He had put on weight, but he was not fat, there was just a hint of a beer belly under the blue Metal Workers Union windcheater. ‘I took a punt – ordered you a red.’ ‘Thanks, still my drink of choice. I used to pretend I liked beer, I thought it’d make me look more Australian, but I gave up that a long time ago.’ ‘I remember,’ Sam said, ‘Unfortunately, I like the stuff too much, more ocker than the ones born here.’ It was 2pm, Paolina was in bed too …show more content…
‘Just a few compulsive gamblers now,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t come here anymore? This would still be your local?’ ‘This or the Blarney’s. But I don’t go to the pub much. Tend to do my drinking on the back veranda at home. I haven’t been in here for a good 10 years. Paolina dragged me here one night, she wanted to have dinner and play the pokies. I couldn’t stomach it. Too many memories. I kept looking over at the bar expecting to see Bob or Slav. I kept thinking I could hear Bob’s laughter…we didn’t even stay to eat.’ ‘Sorry mate, maybe we should’ve gone somewhere else,’ Sam said picking up his beer and taking a long swig. Antonello looked at Sam’s face, so familiar. The broad Roman nose, the busy eyebrows, the brown eyes. ‘No it’s okay. I’m okay. I was going to suggest somewhere else but nowhere else seemed right either.’ It was a weary pub. Gone were workers who’d filled the bar every night, gone with the closing down of the surrounding factories. No more punters. It had been renovated several times since the 70s, the layers of change were visible, one on top of the other, like poorly applied make-up over scar tissue, it failed to camouflage its
One week after Lennie's death, George sits in the dark corner of a bar. The room is all but empty and dead silent. All the windows are shut, through the small openings come beams of dull light that barely illuminate the room. George stares at his glass with an expressionless face, but a heavy sadness in his eyes. The bartender comes towards him and asks if he would like something else to drink.
Shortly before he went into the theater, he stopped at tavern for a drink. While in the bar an
The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty... (P 179)
He pressed back into the seat, as though to hide, and noticed an exceptionally pretty, small blond girl enter the bar, with a guy, who was tall to her small, dark to her blonde and lean to her curvaceousness. He was dressed in a red shirt hanging over black jeans, had a beard, and very pale face. She shone like a lamp beside him. He watched them covertly.
The concept of dignity becomes important, as according to Charles E. May, “’A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’ dramatizes modern man’s pursuit of dignity amid the destruction of the old values,” with May referring to the dissolution of the old religious, social and political boundaries of centuries before because of the Great War. The older waiter understands that the old man prefers to stay late at the café rather than go home or go to a bar because a café-while being like a bar in that they are temporary escapes from the depravity of the outside world-displays a certain degree of dignity and order that bars lack. That dignity is the last sort of “something” for the old man and the older waiter to cling to even as they feel life quietly unravel around them.
It's been nine years since he left home at eighteen to escape his parent's iron cages and leaching love. It was a moonless autumn night, cooler than usual. Everything seemed to be in order: tables set, plates stacked, cups washed, shades drawn, lighting just below half for ambiance, music audible but not intrusive, air temperature at a comfortable range so women can decide to remove their shawl or not and men can keep their vests or choose to set them aside. Neatly, of course. He watched as a man entered, bringing a wave of cold air with him. This man, older, was certainly not the type to dine here. Royce's intuition was telling him something was very wrong. That’s when their eyes met. It sparked a cold sweat to bead up around his hairline. But his training kicked in and his feet moved silently and politely over to where the man was waiting to be seated. The words 'right this way, sir' slipped from his mouth as it did thousands of times before, as he chauffeured the man to an empty
Because confrontations usually happen at a bar or a pub, these are not simply settings for drama; they also emphasize the drinking nature of Britain’s citizens. Characters are rarely seen without a g...
‘ Though he enjoyed the theatre hadn’t crossed the doors of one for twenty years’. ‘Utterson was. austere with himself’. Drinking alone, having the security of knowing that he is the only person who might witness and therefore judge him, the respected gentleman could appear a little out of. control.
Celie believes she has no power or say against her father and the choices he makes for her. Alfonso begins to talk about choosing a husband for Celie because he has grown tired of her and is ready to get rid of her. Alfonso also gets bored with his wife, and starts to gravitate toward his younger daughter Nettie again. Celie offers herself to Alfonso in an attempt to save her sister. Alfonso accepts her offers and has sex with her instead of Nettie, while his new wife is sick. Alfonso uses Celie for sex tries and in an attempt to turn the other girls against her he badmouths her and says that she’s a bad influence. He says Celie "ain 't fresh" (isn 't a virgin) and that she is “spoiled” Alfonso sees women as objects and once they have been
Then he laughed out at the humor of the situation; and he says, ‘Well, Sam Snaffles, you’ve got me dead this time. You’re a different man from what I thought you. But, Sam, you’ll confess, I reckon, that ef I hedn’t sent you off with a flea in your ear when I hed you up afore the looking-glass, you’d never ha’ gone to work to git the “capital.”(461)
...tow upon him the humanity we so brutally robbed him of the previous night. The counter clerk replied that he came into the restaurant often, ordered a cup of coffee, sat at the same booth in the dark corner, and slowly sipped the hot contents as if savoring every last drop of the civilization it provided.
Guy uses alcohol as an example to argue that Mid-Victorian authors ‘tended to see drunkenness as a form of personal immorality’ going further to suggest that there was a failure to connect these social issues ‘with other problems such as poverty and unemployment’ . In essence, this argument generalises an idea that the view on recreational evils such as alcoholic and drug abuse Victorians is a personal rather than a social problem. Whilst this may be the case on a majority scale, Guy fails to provide any evidence of Victorians that fail to recognise the apparently updated idea that drug and alcohol abuse is closely related to the social issues more prevalent in the Condition of England
To the reader Sydney is presented as a man who places alcohol as his first priority. But now that he has met Lucie, he begins to set his priorities straight and he pyts Lucie in fro...
To comprehend what an English bar is, it is essential to take a gander at the typical objects and curios of the atmosphere and what part do these objects play in the communal life of the English Pub. In this way one has to watch the fundamental attributes of the English Pubs and attempt to find what part these ancient rarities play and what social acts do they bolster in the social atmosphere.
When discussing the poetic form of dramatic monologue it is rare that it is not associated with and its usage attributed to the poet Robert Browning. Robert Browning has been considered the master of the dramatic monologue. Although some critics are skeptical of his invention of the form, for dramatic monologue is evidenced in poetry preceding Browning, it is believed that his extensive and varied use of the dramatic monologue has significantly contributed to the form and has had an enormous impact on modern poetry. "The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning represent the most significant use of the form in postromantic poetry" (Preminger and Brogan 799). The dramatic monologue as we understand it today "is a lyric poem in which the speaker addresses a silent listener, revealing himself in the context of a dramatic situation" (Murfin 97). "The character is speaking to an identifiable but silent listener at a dramatic moment in the speaker's life. The circumstances surrounding the conversation, one side which we "hear" as the dramatic monologue, are made by clear implication, and an insight into the character of the speaker may result" (Holman and Harmon 152).