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Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bonfire of the Vanities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Morality, Power, and Self-Interest
Stereotypes, Ignorance, and Racism
Wealth, Class, and Status
Transactional Relationships
Truth and Bias
Summary
Analysis
Sherman walks with his daughter, Campbell, to her bus stop. She’s in first grade at a private school. While they’re walking, Campbell asks Sherman, “What if there is no God?” Sherman is taken aback. He says that he’s not sure how to answer because of course there is a God. When Campbell changes the subject and doesn’t ask about God again, though, Sherman is almost disappointed. He thinks that a six-year-old questioning God’s existence must be a surefire sign of intelligence. As they walk, Sherman thinks proudly that he and Campbell must look to others like the ideal father and daughter, with Campbell in her private school uniform and he in his expensive suit and Ivy League good looks.
While Sherman walks with Campbell, he’s struck by how she and Sherman must look like the ideal daughter and father to others. That thought shows how much value Sherman puts into what other people think of him. In that way, Sherman’s identity seems to be almost entirely determined by what other people think of him. That is, Sherman seems to think he’s a good father as long as he appears to be a good father to others. However, previous segments in the novel have shown him doing things like declining to spend time with his daughter so that he could leave home and have sex with his mistress, showing that he is not in fact the kind of “ideal father” that he hopes his image portrays. Sherman, however, seems entirely oblivious to the discordance between who he actually is and how he might seem superficially. And he then chooses to believe the superficial appearance of himself as an “ideal father” rather than try to determine what it might take to actually be a good father.
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At the bus stop, Sherman considers propositioning one of the mothers who is also there with her daughter, but he ultimately decides against it. After Campbell gets on the bus, Sherman thinks that he moved his marriage one step closer to divorce through his mistake last night. Judy slept on the daybed to avoid being near him. At that moment, Sherman hates himself. He then goes to buy a copy of The New York Times and finds himself attracted to the woman who sells it to him. Outside, he feels like sex is in the air. It’s like a blizzard, he thinks, and he tries to convince himself that there’s no moral component to sleeping with Maria. Instead, it’s as if he just got caught outside in the snow.
Just after Sherman feels gratified because he seems to appear like the perfect father, he considers propositioning another student’s mother at his daughter’s bus stop, suggesting again that there is a wide gap between the image that Sherman hopes to portray to others (and seems to believe himself) and who he actually is. Sherman then shows a tendency to try to avoid taking responsibility or facing guilt for his own wrongdoing when he rationalizes his marital indiscretions by claiming that there’s no moral component to his infidelity.
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Sherman gets a taxi to Wall Street. He thinks of his father, who, as a point of pride, took the subway to Wall Street his whole life. But Sherman is fine paying the $10 each morning for the taxi. After all, what’s it to him, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”? In the taxi, Sherman wonders what his father would have made of the price he (Sherman) paid for his apartment. It cost $2,600,000, and they’d borrowed $1,800,000 of that. Now they pay $21,000 a month on the loan and will have to pay a million dollar lump sum in two years.
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Sherman makes his way to the investment banking firm where he works, Pierce & Pierce. He works in the bond trading room on the 50th floor. When he reaches the trading floor, he’s greeted by the roar of traders. His fellow traders are, like him, young men who went to elite colleges. (Sherman went to Yale.) All of them are White. Sherman is the firm’s leading bond seller. Traders make a base salary and then earn commissions and also share some profits. It's customary for a bond salesman to make $250,000 within five years and a million dollars a year by the time they’re 40.
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Sherman sees another salesman reading reports about the day’s horse races and loudly chastises him for being lazy and not working. Sherman likes being seen as the enforcer on the trading floor. Sherman then sits down to work. He currently has a scheme to sell a French bond called Giscard. The bond is tied to the franc and the gold marker, which fluctuated wildly after the bond was first introduced. Now, though, things seem to have steadied, and Sherman is convinced that the bond could be a cash cow. He persuaded the firm’s CEO, Gene Lopwitz, to put $600 million of Pierce & Pierce’s money into the bond. Now Sherman is working to sell off those bonds. If he succeeds, he’ll net $1.75 million from the deal, which he’ll use to pay off the loan he took out for the apartment.
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At 10 AM, Sherman goes to a meeting in Lopwitz’s office with Rawlie and five others. Sherman and Rawlie went to private high school and then Yale together and now work together at Pierce & Pierce. Lopwitz’s office is outfitted like the lounge of an English hotel where they serve tea. Lopwitz isn’t there. He’s in England, watching a cricket match, but he calls in and communicates with the group through a small speaker on the table. The group decides whether to buy $2, $4, or $6 billion worth of a government bond that will go on sale later that day. Ultimately, the group decides on a $6 billion buy.
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At 1 PM, the bond goes on sale and the group makes the $6 billion buy. That group then works frantically to sell off the bonds. By 5 PM, they’ve sold 40% of the bonds and have netted a profit of almost $3 million. There’s a chance that the price could go up further, and they’ll make even more of a profit on the remaining 60% of the bonds. Sherman feels again like a “Master of the Universe.” He can’t believe that Judy had the gall to get angry with him over something as unimportant as a phone call.
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