Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Brighton Rock, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Catholicism
Pride and Ambition
Sex and Shame
Innocence vs. Experience
Summary
Analysis
Dallow and Judy are still at the Brighton café, waiting for Pinkie and Rose to return. Judy asks who the large woman staring at them is, and Dallow realizes it’s the same woman who’s been giving Pinkie such a hard time. He walks over and asks Ida what she wants with them. Ida asks him to have a drink with her. Then she informs him that Prewitt was picked up by the police before he could get on the boat. He’s been arrested for swindling. Then she says that she’s been talking to Cubitt. That’s how she knows all about what they did to Hale. She tells Dallow to invite Judy over but he says he’d better not: she’s a jealous bitch. Judy comes over anyway, wanting to know what they’re talking about.
What Ida tells Dallow about Prewitt is later revealed to be a lie, but Ida has reached what she senses is the final chapter in her investigation and she hopes the falsehood about Prewitt will motivate Dallow to talk. Besides, she has always been willing to lie to get what she wants. That willingness comes from a firm sense that she is in the right and Pinkie and his men in the wrong. Like Pinkie, she believes that the ends justify the means.
Themes
Ida offers Dallow twenty pounds. She’d like to have a little chat. Dallow leaves, disgusted. He walks in the direction of the shooting booth, looking for Pinkie. He’d heard shots and thought it was him, but he’s nowhere to be seen. The shooting booth attendant tells Dallow that Pinkie and Rose took off for Hastings but he refuses to tell Dallow the time; he’s sick of being used for alibis. Dallow listens to the clock strike four. He wishes he hadn’t had so much beer. He remembers seeing Rose trying to light a fire in Frank’s kitchen and feels overcome by a desire to have something Judy can’t give him: domestic comforts, mundane happiness.
The clock striking the hour tells Dallow, just as it told Spicer and Cubitt before him, that the time he has spent as a member of Pinkie’s gang has gotten him nowhere close to the life he wants. The thought of Rose’s sweet, domestic habits convinces Dallow that what he would really like is a wife and the boring day-to-day existence of a happily married man.
Themes
Dallow heads for the car park, knowing that Pinkie’s Morris won’t be there. The attendant tells him Pinkie and Rose took off for Peacehaven for a drink. Dallow is helpless. He knows what Pinkie intends to do; he’s left little hints and breadcrumbs everywhere. He turns and Ida is there, telling him to get a car. Dallow says he doesn’t have money for it; besides, it’s always been his job to follow Pinkie’s lead. Ida insists they get a car and drive to Peacehaven right then to stop Pinkie from following through on his plan.
Dallow knows how to kill. He’s less knowledgeable when it comes to saving someone. Ida is, as always, a woman of action, but she is hiding from Dallow that she is interested not just in saving Rose’s life, but trapping Pinkie into confessing the murders of Hale and Spicer.
Themes
