Beat Generation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Beat Generation - Essay congresswomanWhen the play begins, the black man, Clay, is alone in a subway rail railway car. The stage directions imply that the picturesque white girl, Lula, has set her sights on him for reasons that should become clearer as the play progresses. She stares at him, and when he catches her eye, begins very premeditatedly to smiling (4). He returns the smile for a moment, without a trace of self-consciousness (4). A little later he appears to regret this instinctive if undesirable (4) response and and becomes more confident when the train moves on and he hopes to be left to savor the pleasant memory of this brief encounter (4) by himself. Lula, however, seeks him out and takes a seat beside him, greeting him with a Hello (5). After accusing him of staring at her, of taking amiable potshots of her ass and legs (7) she reveals in her first significant statement that she had boarded the train with the express intention of tracking him cut I even got into t his train, going some other way than mine. Walked down the aisle. . .searching you out (7). This makes clear the position that Lula had deliberately set her sights on Clay that day, for premeditated reasons of her own. In a sense, she seems to have made up her mind to hunt him down.Clay is pleasantly aroused by the attention of this beautiful woman although he cannot make her out. She appears to know rather a bit about him. Nevertheless she disavows all previous experience of him as individual, and very confidently declares that she knows his type like the palm of my hand (17). She appears to believe in full-grown fair warning, as the following words of another very significant statement will awardLULA. ... (She feints a seriousness to cover an actual somber tone.)I lie a lot. (Smiling)It helps me control the world. (9)This seems to be a very prescient bit of self-knowledge on her part. Control of her surroundings, including the people around her, seems to be an crucial consid eration with her. Right from the moment she first trained the telescope of her sight on Clay, she has tried quite hard to control this stranger who in her words, could be a handsome man (12).When Lula ridicules Clays westernized manner of dress, it is homy to the audience if not to Clay that she is an unabashed black-basher. In fact, she is almost openly abusive when she snaps at him for wearing a three- howeverton suit What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie Your grandfather was a slave, he didnt go to Harvard (18). However, Clay does not reply in configuration to this, he is content to merely set the record straight about his grandfather-My grandfather was a darkness watchman (18). He self-deprecatingly tells her that, in college, I thought I was Baudelaire (19). She gives a biting retort I bet you never thought you were a black nigger (19). Clay is stunned(19) at this, but quite sportingly, he quickly tries to appreciate the humor (19) while Lula almost shrieks A black Baudelaire (19). Lulas only intention all along was to manipulate and humiliate Clay within the confines of the subway car and, if possible, outside it, too. She first seduces his attention, and then, perhaps feeling that he was not sufficiently under her control, tries to excite him sexually. When he refuses to