Morality, Power, and Self-Interest Theme Analysis

They’re going down a stairway. They’re clattering on some metal strips. He’s in one piece. The mob isn’t even on his heels. He’s safe—his heart sinks. They’re not even trying to follow him. They never really tried to touch him. And in that moment…he knows. He knows even before his mind can put it all together.

“I did the wrong thing […] I panicked. I’ve lost it all.”

The Masters of the Universe were a set of lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with. They looked like Norse gods who lifted weights, and they had names such as Dracon, Ahor, Mangelred, and Blutong. They were unusually vulgar, even for plastic toys. Yet one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $50,000 commission, just like that, this very phrase had bubbled up into his brain. On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that…Masters of the Universe. There was…no limit whatsoever!

Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.

[Kramer] was damned if he felt like having Andy Heller look him in the face and say, “Larry Kramer, how you doing!” and then, “What you doing?” And he would have to say, “Well, I’m an assistant district attorney up in the Bronx.” He wouldn’t even have to add, “Making $36,000 a year.” That was common knowledge. All the while, Andy Heller would be scanning his dirty raincoat, his old gray suit, which was too short in the pants, his Nike sneakers, his A&P shopping bag.

No wonder marriages used to hold up better. Sherman’s parents and their friends had all had plenty of servants, and the servants had worked long hours and lived in. If you were unwilling to argue in front of the servants, then there wasn’t much opportunity to argue at all.

You’re not investing in a day-care center for the children of Harlem. You’re investing in the souls…the souls…of the people who’ve been in Harlem too long to look at it like children any longer, people who’ve grown up with a righteous anger in their hearts and a righteous steam building up in their souls, ready to blow. A righteous steam […] Oh, conduct your audit!…But the time is coming when you will say: ‘Thank God. Thank God! Thank God we entered the money on the books Reverend Bacon’s way!’ Because I’m the conservative, whether you know it or not. You don’t know who’s out there on those wild and hungry streets. I am your prudent broker on Judgment Day. Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, they’re gonna blow, my friend, and on that day, how grateful you will be for your prudent broker…your prudent broker…who can control the steam.”

“Come to think of it,” said Moody, “I never have seen a black waiter in a restaurant in New York, except for lunch counters. You really think Bacon is going to get anywhere?”

“Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Well, what will happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Fiske […] “I kind of think they just might settle for a contribution to the Reverend Mr. Bacon’s good works in Harlem, and then they’ll move on to the next restaurant.”

“Then it’s just a payoff,” said Moody.

“Well, that’s the funny thing,” said Fiske. “Things do change. I’m not sure he cares whether they change or not, but they change. Places he never heard of, and wouldn’t care about if he had, they’ll start hiring black waiters rather than wait for Buck and all those characters to turn up.”

“You’re thinking about ‘honor students’ and ‘higher achievers’ and all that, and that’s natural enough, as I say. But at Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School, an honor student is somebody who attends class, isn’t disruptive, tries to learn, and does all right at reading and arithmetic.”

“Well, let’s use that standard. By that standard, is Henry Lamb an honor student?”

“By that standard, yes.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Rifkind.”

“Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that.” Judy was smiling, and so was Campbell, who seemed to realize that this was a joke, a kind of fairy tale based on what her daddy did.

“Little crumbs?” she said encouragingly.

“Yes,” said Judy. “Or you have to imagine little crumbs, but a lot of little crumbs. If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake.”

One of the Lion’s maxims was “A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.”

He was experiencing the resentment of those who discover that, despite their own grave condition, the world goes on about its business, heartless, without even so much as a long face.

[Kramer] saw it before the words were even out of his mouth…the drawing…by the courtroom artist…He could see it as if the TV screen were already right in front of him…Assistant District Attorney Lawrence N. Kramer…on his feet…his forefinger raised…his massive sternocleidomastoid muscles welling out…But how would the artist deal with his skull, where he had lost so much hair? Well, if the drawing did justice to his powerful frame, no one would notice. The courage and the eloquence…that’s what they would see. The whole city of New York would see it. Miss Shelly Thomas would see it.

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

I’m not superior, you oh-so-knowing, oh-so-ignorant fool! I’m one of them! My heart goes out to them! […] In short, he was learning for himself the truth of the saying “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.”

Imagine! Him! The budding star of the McCoy case—and no place—no place at all!—in the very Babylon of the twentieth century!—to take a lovely willing girl with brown lipstick. He wondered what was going through her mind at this moment.

In fact, she was thinking about the way men are in New York. Every time you go out with one, you have to sit there and listen to two or three hours of My Career first.

“You’ve never been through anything like this. I don’t doubt you’ve seen a lot of it, but you’ve never been through it. I can’t explain the feeling. All I can tell you is that I’m already dead, or the Sherman McCoy of the McCoy family and Yale and Park Avenue and Wall Street is dead. Your self—I don’t know how to explain it, but if, God forbid, anything like this ever happens to you, you’ll know what I mean. Your self…is other people, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.”

If an old man was dying on the carpet a few feet from your table, what was the proper thing to do? Offer your services? But there was already a traffic jam there in the aisle between the rows of tables. Clear the area and give him air and come back later to complete the meal? But how would empty tables help the man? Stop eating until the drama had played itself out and the old man was out of sight? But the orders were in, and the food had begun to arrive, and there was no sign of any halt—and this meal was costing about $150 per person, once you added in the cost of the wine, and it was no mean trick getting a seat in a restaurant like this in the first place. Avert your eyes? Well, perhaps that was the only solution. So they averted their eyes and returned to their picturesque dishes…but there was something damned depressing about it all, because it was hard for your eyes not to wander every few seconds to see if, f’r Chrissake, they hadn’t moved the stricken hulk. A man dying! O mortality! Probably a heart attack, too!

An excellent feeling came over Kramer, in every cell and every neural fiber. In that instant, the instant of that little swallow, his scuffed attaché case meant nothing, nor did his clodhopper shoes nor his cheap suit nor his measly salary nor his New York accent nor his barbarisms and solecisms of speech. For in that moment he had something that these Wasp counselors, these immaculate Wall Street partners from the universe of the Currys & Goads & Pesteralls & Dunnings & Spongets & Leaches would never know and never feel the inexpressible pleasure of possessing. And they would remain silent and polite in the face of it, as they were right now, and they would swallow with fear when and if their time came. And he now understood what it was that gave him a momentary lift each morning as he saw the island fortress rise at the crest of the Grand Concourse from the gloom of the Bronx. For it was nothing less than the Power, the same Power to which Abe Weiss himself was totally given over. It was the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects.

“I’m not Sherman McCoy anymore. I’m somebody else without a proper name. I’ve been that other person ever since the day I was arrested. I knew something…something fundamental had happened that day, but I didn’t know what it was at first. At first I thought I was still Sherman McCoy, and Sherman McCoy was going through a period of very bad luck. Over the last couple of days, though, I’ve begun to face up to the truth. I’m somebody else. I have nothing to do with Wall Street or Park Avenue or Yale or St. Paul’s or Buckley or the Lion of Dunning Sponget.”

“You know the way they can take a dog, a house pet, like a police dog that’s been fed and pampered all its life, and train it to be a vicious watchdog?”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Killian.

“I’ve seen it done,” said Quigley. “I saw it done when I was on the force.”

“Well, then you know the principle,” said Sherman. “They don’t alter that dog’s personality with dog biscuits or pills. They chain it up, and they beat it, and they bait it, and they taunt it, and they beat it some more, until it turns and bares its fangs and is ready for the final fight every time it hears a sound.”

“That’s true,” said Quigley.

“Well, in that situation dogs are smarter than humans,” said Sherman. “The dog doesn’t cling to the notion that he’s a fabulous house pet in some terrific dog show, the way the man does. The dog gets the idea. The dog knows when it’s time to turn into an animal and fight.”

Yes—but I’m doing something illegal! Around and around it went in his mind as the tape rolled on…And Sherman McCoy, he who had now vowed to be his animal self, discovered what many had discovered before him. In well-reared girls and boys, guilt and the instinct to obey the rules are reflexes, ineradicable ghosts in the machine.

“What makes you think you can come before the bench waving the banner of community pressure? The law is not a creature of the few or of the many.”

In an unusual development, Mr. Weiss was forced to remove the prosecutor of the first trial, Lawrence N. Kramer, from the case when it was disclosed that Mr. Kramer had interceded with a landlord to secure the so-called rent-controlled love nest apartment for a friend, Shelly Thomas, an advertising copywriter.