is reflected symbolically through Algren’s description of a fly without wings in Steffi’s room: After he “seduces” her, Bruno destroys the fly. Later, when Bruno wins a Kewpie doll and subsequently and unthinkingly destroys it, Algren ties the fate of the doll, an appropriate symbol, to Steffi, who is won and destroyed by Bruno. Steffi’s fate seems even crueler than Bruno’s, as he will “escape” in death but Steffi will remain trapped with the other prostitutes who endure at “Mama” Tomek’s brothel.

Before he is incarcerated, Bruno does mature through a series of tests that prove his manhood. Although he cannot articulate his love and desire for forgiveness, he does come to understand that love is compatible with manhood. When he arranges a fight for himself with Honeyboy Tucker, he acts independently; when he overcomes Fireball Kodadek and Tiger Pultoric, Bonifacy’s thugs, he overcomes his fear of physical mutilation (Fireball’s knife) and of his idol and father figure (Pultoric is the former champion). Before he can “be his own man,” Bruno must overcome his childish dependence and hero worship. Bruno’s subsequent victory over Tucker makes his earlier symbolic victory official and gives him the identity he seeks as a promising “contender,” but that identity is destroyed when he is arrested only minutes later and sent to jail.

Images of imprisonment pervade the novel, which is concerned with the institutions that house inmates. When Bruno first serves time, Algren digresses to describe prison life, just as he digresses when he recounts Steffi’s life at the brothel, where she is no less a prisoner. While she is there, she dreams of a “great stone penitentiary” and of the “vault” that is the barber’s room. The prison and the brothel are appropriate institutions for a city that Algren compares to a madhouse. (Algren also sees the prostitutes as inmates of an insane asylum.) There is no escape for Steffi or Bruno, just as there is no real morning in this somber tale of darkness and night. Algren’s Chicago is America in microcosm: As madhouse, prison, and brothel, it is an insane, entrapped world where people “sell out,” thereby prostituting themselves.

The Man with the Golden Arm

In The Man with the Golden Arm, also set in Polish American Chicago, Algren reiterates many of the themes, images, and character types that exist in Never Come Morning. Although the novel’s controversial theme of drug addiction has received much attention, Algren is not concerned with drug addiction per se but rather with the forces, external and internal, that lead to the addictive, dependent personalities that render people unable to cope with their environments or escape from them. Once again, Algren’s characters are life’s losers, “the luckless living soon to become the luckless dead,” the “wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed” who become the “disinherited,” those who emerge “from the wrong side of its [America’s] billboards.” The “hunted who also hope” in Never Come Morning become the “pursued” in The Man with the Golden Arm, which also relies on naturalistic metaphors comparing people and animals.

Given that the characters are themselves victims of a system that excludes them, it seems ironic that they should experience guilt, but Algren’s protagonist, Frankie Machine, is trapped by the guilt he feels at having been responsible for the car accident that has paralyzed Sophie, his wife. (Since Sophie has induced the paralysis—there is nothing physically wrong with her—his guilt is even more ironic.) Sophie uses Frankie’s guilt to “hook” (a word suggesting addiction) him, punish him, and contribute to their self-destructive mutual dependence. Algren describes Frankie’s guilt as “slow and cancerous” and even has Louie, the pusher, attribute drug addiction to the desire for self-punishment. Frankie, the “pursued,” is not alone in his guilt, for Algren portrays Record Head Bednar, the “pursuer,” as also afflicted by a consuming guilt. As the agent of “justice,” he feels “of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others.” Bednar, who is hardly without sin, must nevertheless “cast the first stone.”

Sin and guilt permeate this novel, which belabors religious imagery, particularly that concerning the Crucifixion of Christ. The controlling metaphor in the novel is Sophie’s “luminous crucifix,” which she uses to enslave Frankie. Sophie states, “My cross is this chair. I’m settin’ on my cross.I’m nailed to mine.” When her friend Violet suggests that she is driving in her own “nails,” Sophie evades the issue because her “crucifixion,” while voluntary, is not selfless but selfish. Algren observes the parallels between Sophie and Christ—both have been betrayed and bleed for the sins of others. Sophie lacks love, however. In another parody of the Crucifixion, Sparrow protests to Bednar, “You’re nailin’ me to the cross, Captain”; Bednar responds, “What the hell you think they’re [the politicians] doin’ to me?” Although they have enough religious teaching to mouth biblical allusions, Algren’s characters use Christianity only as popular culture, as a source, like advertising and films, of reference to their own ego-centered worlds. Although Algren suggests that “God had forgotten His own,” at least in Frankie’s case, it is at least equally true that, as Sophie confesses, she and Frankie have forgotten God. Sophie’s pathetic, self-centered musing about God having gone somewhere and keeping his distance indicate that God has no place in the world of Division Street. Surely Algren’s allusion to the gamblers’ God, who watches Sparrow’s “fall,” reflects the post-Christian modern world.

In Algren’s naturalistic world, the characters are seen as caged animals waiting to be slaughtered. At the beginning of the novel, Frankie, who waits for justice from Bednar, watches a roach drowning in a bucket and is tempted to help it, but the roach dies before he intercedes, just as Frankie dies without anyone interceding for him. Algren’s metaphor for the trapped Sophie is equally flattering. When she hears the mousetrap in the closet snap shut, she feels “it close as if it had shut within herself, hard and fast forever.” Even Molly Novotny, who resembles Steffi in Never Come Morning in that she is a “fallen woman” and agent of redemption, is depicted as living in a “nest.” In fact, Algren uses animal imagery to suggest Frankie’s impending fate. When Frankie is apprehended for stealing irons, Algren describes the saleswomen as “over-fed hens” and “bosomy biddies” and then has Frankie glimpse “a butcher holding a broken-necked rooster.” Since Frankie finally hangs himself, the glimpse is ironically prophetic. Frankie’s addiction is also expressed in animal terms: Frankie has a “monkey on his back,” and although he temporarily rids himself of the monkey, permanent escape is impossible. The two caged monkeys at the Kitten Klub shriek insults at the patrons and serve as the metaphor incarnate for Frankie’s addiction.

Frankie’s addiction is also expressed in terms of an army buddy also addicted to morphine, Private McGantic, whose “presence” is akin to the monkey’s. By the end of the novel, Frankie has “become” Private McGantic: Frankie calls himself “Private Nowhere,” suggesting both the identification and the lack of direction. “Private McGantic” is, however, only one of Frankie’s identities; the novel recounts his futile attempt to become someone other than Frankie Machine (the assumed name reflects his lost humanity), the Dealer. He wants Molly to call him “the Drummer,” not “the Dealer,” but he never becomes a professional musician, and part of his tragedy is that he does not know who he is: “Who am I anyway, Solly?” The answer Solly (Sparrow) gives, “Be yourself,” is a meaningless cliché, an example of circular reasoning because Frankie does not know what his “self” is. The official inquest into the death of Francis Majcinek (Frankie’s “real” name) establishes nothing of consequence (his addiction is not even alluded to) except that he is “the deceased,” one of the “luckless dead” Algren mentions earlier in the novel. Even his fictional life is not “real”: It is a “comic strip” from birth to death.

A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren’s fourth novel, is a reworking of Somebody in Boots, published some twenty years earlier. As a result, although it resembles Algren’s other works in its characters, loose structure, and imagery, it also looks back to an earlier time, the Great Depression, and its setting is New Orleans rather than Chicago. Once again, Algren focuses on prison inmates, whose “kangaroo court” justice is superior to the justice they receive “outside,” and on prostitutes, who also “serve their time” and are compared to caged birds (the brothel is an “aviary”). Despite their situation and their pasts, they are “innocent children” in their naïveté and illusions, and one of them is the means by which the hero is redeemed. Other notable characters include the freaks and the cripples who frequent Dockerty’s “Dollhouse” and who are the physical counterparts of the emotional cripples in the novel. Achilles Schmidt, legless former circus strongman, is the exception, for he has found psychological strength through the accident that should have “crippled” him. It is only when Dove Linkhorn, the protagonist, is blinded and therefore “crippled” by Schmidt that he rids himself of the illusions that have weakened him.

A parody of the Horatio Alger myth of the American Dream, A Walk on the Wild Side concerns an ambitious young man who “wants to make something of himself” and leaves the farm to find fame and fortune in the city. Dove’s journey is “educational” in terms of the reading instruction he receives and the culture he acquires as well as the “lessons” he learns about capitalism and life in general. At the beginning of the novel, Dove is an “innocent,” as his name suggests, but that “innocence” is not sexual—he rapes Terasina, the earth mother who is also his first “mentor”—but experiential, in that he believes in the “Ladder of Success” with “unlimited opportunities” for “ambitious young men.” Algren offers Dove a naturalistic parable of capitalism, particularly on the tenuous nature of life at the top. The headless terrapin in the fish market struggles to the top by using its superior strength in “wading contentedly over mothers and orphans,” but its reign as king of the turtles is short-lived, and it has literally and symbolically “lost its head.” Algren adds that Dove does not know that “there was also room for one more on the bottom.” Before he reaches the bottom, Dove becomes a salesman, the epitome of the enterprising capitalist; the coffee scam and the phony beauty-parlor certificate racket, while illegal, are also seen as integral parts of capitalism.

Before he achieves his greatest success as a “salesman” of sex, Dove works, appropriately, in a condom manufacturing plant, which also sells sex. In his role as “Big Stingaree” in Finnerty’s brothel, he is paid to perform an art that involves the “deflowering” of “virgins,” who are played by prostitutes. In effect, the brothel, the primary setting of the novel, also serves as the symbolic center, as Algren presents a society that has sold itself—prostituted itself—to survive. Ironically, the real prostitutes in the brothel are morally superior to the “prostitutes” in mainstream American society, the “Do-Right Daddies,” the powerful people who crusade against sin but also sin within the laws they create.

Hallie Breedlove, a prostitute, “sins,” but she is capable of love and compassion, first with Schmidt and then with Dove, with whom she leaves the brothel. The “escape” is futile, however, for Hallie’s subsequent pregnancy, in the light of her black “blood,” threatens their future, and she believes that she can have her child only if she returns to her past, the mulatto village where she was born. Dove lacks her insight and, in his attempt to find her, he is jailed, is released, and then loses his sight in a battle with Schmidt. Metaphorically, however, in searching for her, he finds himself, and in losing his vision, he gains insight. Having learned that the “loser’s side of the street” is superior to the “winners’ side,” Dove abandons his quest for success and returns to his Texas hometown to be reconciled with Terasina. Unlike Bruno and Frankie, Dove not only survives but also resolves to deal constructively with the guilt caused by his sin against his woman.

The Devil’s Stocking

Algren’s last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, is not so much a novel as a fictional treatment of the trial and imprisonment of Hurricane Carter. What began as an assignment for Esquire magazine, covering a boxer’s murder trial, grew to “novel” proportions, probably because of the boxing and the trial, both of which appear in his other novels. The Algren characters—prostitutes, gamblers, police officers, and petty crooks—reappear in the novel about Carter, renamed Ruby Calhoun for fictive purposes. Because of its geographic and chronological distance from his earlier novels, as well as its blending of fact and fiction, The Devil’s Stocking is not among the works for which Algren will be remembered.

Despite the qualified optimism of A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren’s novels tend to paint a negative image of capitalistic American society, with its nightmarish American Dream. Chicago and New Orleans become microcosms of America, a country marked by images of madness, imprisonment, and prostitution. In that world, virtue, such as it is, resides on the “loser’s side of the street,” in the prisons and the brothels. Constricted by their backgrounds, Algren’s male protagonists typically strive to escape and assume new identities, sin against women (thereby incurring guilt that compounds their problems), serve time in prison (presented as a place of refuge), and pursue a self-destructive course that leads inevitably to death or mutilation.