Analysis#4

Analysis #4

Waiting for Lefty: Waiting for hope

          How do people assess a human’s worth? Do they measure human value on the base of intelligence, richness, beauty, an authority figure, or power?  In Clifford Odet’s time, social class is economic arrangements of groups in society.  People are separated into two classes which are capitalist and working class.  Waiting for Lefty is about cab drivers who want to strike for better lives.  The major solution to the problem is unionization which is where the workers in specific traders would bond together and receive, among other benefits, standardized wages, and greater job security.  The writer deals with American tragedy which is rooted in American history and social movements.  He focuses on social class, especially on working class.  He elaborately explains the differences between capitalist who run the company on worker’s suffering, and working class people who endure pain to work for their duty and survival. 

          The writer imitates a real world situation to a small community of the cab driver.  Throughout Waiting for Lefty, Odet shows effects of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel in The communist Manifesto.  It is noted that, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild- master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (P.657).  Unions are the only way for cab drivers to balance the power against big companies.  Besides unions, the big companies can continually drive down wage and create bitter competition among its employee.  The capitalists take advantage of their own people.  Edna, a character from the story, said “Your boss is marking sucker outta you boys every minute.  Yes, and suckers out of all the wives and the poor innocent kids who’ll grow up with crooked spines and sick bones” (P2096).  The working class people must sell their power in order to survive and the ruling class is dependent on them for production.  The cab drivers earn their livelihood be selling their power. 

          The main idea of the writer is society’s inequality between capitalist and working class.  The gap between two classes would just keep bigger and bigger.  The capitalist would be running the country, so they just keep “getting richer and richer while the working class people keep getting poorer.”  The lower class people have no way of getting richer because they are working for the rich capitalists.  The capitalists would rise or low their worker’s salary, and if they run the nation, they would make sure that the working class people got as little salary as possible.  Thus, the working class people would have to rebel against the capitalists in order to get their way or at least to be heard and to try to get more payment. 

Works cited

Lauter, Paul, and Richard Yarborough. The Heath Anthology of American Literature: concise Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.