Last Exit to Brooklyn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1964

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-4

Part 5

Part 6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Cycles of Violence

A cycle of violence entraps the novel’s characters. Growing up and living in a low-income neighborhood, the characters are never far from the threat or temptation of criminality. Petty criminals like Vinnie are well-known for their depravity, and they co-exist with men like Harry Black, a factory worker who is only ostensibly straight-laced. Criminality brings the characters inevitably closer to violence. Harry is so disorientated by his brief association with criminals that he becomes a criminal himself, ending his story in a bloody broken mess in a parking lot. Likewise, Tralala becomes locked in a self-destructive cycle that ends in a gang rape, while a regular night at the Greek diner ends in a brutal fight so unremarkable that the police barely register the pools of blood on the ground. Violence is endemic to this fictive Brooklyn, and it seems unstoppable, with the characters trapped in an unceasing cycle of brutality and regret.

The inescapable nature of these cycles begets more tragedy. The violence is so consuming that it affects innocent bystanders. Domestic abuse, for instance, is rife in the novel. Before Harry Black becomes a corrupt union official, he already harbors abusive thoughts. Abraham similarly has no qualms about beating his wife, while threats toward women are a familiar refrain throughout the public housing depicted in Part 6. The women afflicted are even more trapped than are the perpetrators, and they are routinely beaten and threatened; they lack the means or the resources to escape, so they find themselves at the mercy of male brutality.

The reason for these violent cycles’ entrenched nature is hinted at by the presence of children in the novel. The children depicted in Part 6 grow up in abusive households and witness domestic abuse daily. Abraham, for example, returns home from an affair and beats his wife when she complains of his neglect. Her worthy request is met with violence, so Abraham’s children learn heinous behavior from a young age. They are shown that violence is ubiquitous and normative, as evidenced by the games they play outside the building—games that replicate their parents’ violence. The children’s games are reenactment, training them for a violent adulthood. These cycles of violence are fatalistically refractory.

The Mythology of the Neighborhood

The characters within the novel’s Brooklyn create their own mythology. The local folklore is known to everyone, a collection of tales about thieves, sex workers, and other inhabitants of the margins of society. These stories are circulated among the characters until they become legends. While Vinnie is known to the diner patrons, he is not famous in his own right. When he learns about a big crime elsewhere in the city, he proudly boasts that he shared a jail cell with the perpetrator; Vinnie may not be a part of the folklore, but he proudly declares his proximity to the infamy. He wants to live vicariously through his famous associate, hoping to accrete secondhand prestige. The local folklore is so pervasive that men like Vinnie will exploit even the vaguest of associations.

Like Vinnie, others know that the local folklore rewards notoriety; the local ethos promotes not only criminals, as strange or unique personages also pass into legend. Characters like Tralala and Georgette earn fame not because of their crimes but because of their unique personalities, and they are mythologized because they are unlike anyone else. Being famous or immortalized by local folklore is not a term of endearment or a point of validation; these icons’ individualism defies neighborhood expectations. Without pecuniary wealth to purchase renown, the only other currency is notoriety. In Selby’s Brooklyn, it is better to be infamous than to be a nobody.

The language in the novel echoes the mythological themes. The prose is conversational, with conventional grammar and punctuation often abandoned for the style of bar chatter. The narrative’s freewheeling, sporadic, and scattershot quality unfurls the stories as though they were those same elements of communal folklore. The novel itself becomes an expression of the theme, with the six separate stories and their stylistic presentation emphasizing the idea that the fictional Brooklyn is home to fabled and often dubious figures whose histories comprise a shared communal identity. This Brooklyn is not a physical place; instead, the neighborhood emerges from the stylized stories about characters—sometimes nefarious, other times misunderstood—passed to the reader by equally unreliable or unconventional narrators.

Blurred Identities: Sex, Gender, Class

A recurring theme in Last Exit to Brooklyn is the way in which seemingly fixed identities are deliberately blurred. A key example is the novel’s treatment of gender. Several prominent characters are transgender women. Georgette, Ginger, and Regina challenge the conventional biologistic, cissexist interpretation of gender, to the point where their pronouns reflect their actual gender rather than the gender assigned to them at birth. Some figures still mis-gender these characters, for example, but they do so with deliberate malice, whereas the narration honors their true identities. The conventional ideas are not just accepted by many characters but also internalized: Harry believes himself to be straight because he has never believed that a person could be anything else. He is aware of the existence of gay men, but he has never thought of himself as transgressing societal sexual ideals, and his calcified imagination never quite has the flexibility (or perhaps the courage, or the encouragement) to seek self-understanding. Likewise, Georgette’s brother, Arthur, reinforces conventional ideas of gender by assaulting his sister whenever he can. To men like Arthur or Harry, convention seems natural and immutable, meaning that gender irrevocably corresponds to genitals, and genitals irrevocably dictate sexuality. While Arthur is wholly static in his position, Harry explores the blurred identities of people who are not so bound by convention. He enjoys a brief (if confused) happiness when he dates a transgender woman, an experience that challenges his idea of how gender operates in the world, even though he never understands his desires or even understands the woman herself.

The novel also challenges the idea of social class. Harry identifies as working-class and is so tied to this identity that he embraces his role as a union official, believing that his war against his bosses will substantiate his class identity and bond him to his fellow working-class factory workers. Harry has no friends, but he hopes for at least class allies. However, the novel challenges the idea that men should be bound by working-class solidarity. Harry’s co-workers do not like him; they find him annoying, and his constantly invoked union ideals turn them against him. This loss of working-class solidarity means that Harry has little hesitation to become a comfortable bourgeois manager when given the opportunity. When he begins to run the union office, he quickly becomes lazy and corrupt. He drinks all day and spends his fellow unions members’ money to satisfy his personal needs. Harry begins the story as closely tied to his working-class identity, but as his material and social conditions change, his view of himself is less fixed than he once imagined.