Analysis #4
Waiting for Lefty: Waiting for hope
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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.
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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.
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