You owe me

I’d like to point out how, early on in the tale, I found Ron, the author to have been quite full of himself. It felt as if after every two sentences he was giving us a full account on just how “effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder, tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean” he claims to have been. He had a certain superiority complex that, he thought, placed him above the other, more common men. This, right away, made me recall one of the issues that Marx and Engel had brought up in their text and that, later, Gramsci had repeated in his own, namely the notion that society keeps on elevating certain select individuals above the masses, giving those individuals more value and/or more power then the rest. This way of thinking is what engenders the separation and segregation of classes. If we were to apply the class system to this story (and that really wouldn’t be that big of a stretch), Ron, by his own self-praise and definition, not to mention how he suggests everyone around him were admiring his looks, would have to be on the same level as the bourgeoisie or the “intellectuals”, ranked at the top by society’s standards. On the opposing end, Sarah Cole the “woman homelier than any he has ever seen or imagined before” could most definitely be compared to the proletariat, the lower working class, always being exploited and used by the bourgeoisie who profit from it. And Ron did indeed (sexually) use Sarah. He got satisfaction. But what did Sarah get? Well, she said it herself: “You owe me”.

It’s funny, but I understand Marx a lot more reading this unusual love story than Marx himself. Go figure.