On the revelation that he is a token, the protagonist demonstrates one of the most memorable narrative devices: parenthetical self-reflections particularly on words or phrases that come to mind. This is a habit fully in character with his having taught English for more than thirty years: “Nigger in the woodpile, he thought, and then, why that word, a word he despised and never used so why did it pop up like that.” As Woodruff wonders about other expressions, Petry effectively calls societal assumptions into question. For example, the passage about the hypothetical police bulletin contains a parenthetical aside expressing the racist indictment that any exceptional expenditure by a black man is presumptuous and pretentious.

This technique prepares the reader for the more intense stream-of-consciousness passages touching on preconceptions that language encompasses and the behaviors that accompany them. For example, during the violent rape scene, Woodruff thinks “there are seven of them, young, strong, satanic. He ought to go home where it was quiet and safe, mind his own business—black man’s business; leave this white man’s problem for a white man.” Immediately afterward, Petry illustrates the frustrations experienced by a respectable and educated black man who is compelled to edit himself and guardedly modulate his tone for white hoodlums. Petry’s shocking description and relentless detail, especially of the rape scene, interweave poignantly with Woodruff’s dismal coming to terms with this unfathomable complex. It is no accident that the pivotal scene occurs in a cemetery: Its gratuitous violence constitutes a dead end for all the parties involved. Petry’s symbolism also manifests itself in Woodruff’s literal blindness (he is without his glasses), which in turn reinforces his psychological justification for deserting his post and the girl in order to avoid further trouble for himself.

Woodruff is painfully and simultaneously aware of his status and his denial as both his mind and car speed him back to his proper place. Petry’s skillful embedding of timeless themes raises significant questions about how this story complicates conventional perceptions of protagonists and adversaries, how the seven troublemakers differ from the students whom Woodruff describes as the “Willing Workers of America,” how the boys’ violent acts reflect on the community of Wheeling, how Woodruff’s relationship with his wife (encapsulated in his memories) affects his decision to leave Wheeling, and how readers might identify with Woodruff’s plight at the end of the story. The last question is especially resonant as readers recognize their own complicity in the crimes of varied oppression, their tacit collusion with materialist mainstream culture, and their witnessing of the destruction that ensues when the youths “blackmail a black male.”