The Quitter Section 2: Images

Written Parallel

Harvey says: "But I buckled down to work, boy.  I didn't want to embarrass [my father]" (15).
Harvey says: "When my father came to take me to the new place,...I was suddenly embarrassed by him" (7).

As a child, Harvey was embarrassed of his foreign father, but as he matures, he doesn't want to let him down, although he still doesn't agree with his ways.

Visual Contrast

Throughout the novel, I have been noticing a sharp distinction to how black people and white people are depicted in the illustration, and I've found this difference to be borderline racist.  On page 5 at the bottom, there is an angry mob of black people who look like savages.  Their faces are distorted and they look sort of barbaric.  Whereas, on page 28, when Harvey's classmates are complimenting him on his fighting skills, all the "extras" that are white look very respectable and like nice humans.

Images

Here we have a long shot of Harvey in the boys locker room after he beat up a kid.  Much like many of the shots we've looked at, the most interesting part of the shot does not happen in the middle frame.  Instead, the guy lying on the ground is roughly at the intersection on the bottom right frame (if you can picture a tic-tac-toe grid on the image) and the middle frame is relatively unoccupied.  There are people in the middle, but they are in the back and clearly less important.  This shot I'd argue is slightly a low angle shot.  We can see Harvey's whole body (on the right) but we are below his face so we are looking up at him.  This makes him appear bigger and he is towering over the guy on the floor who he just beat up.