The Cop and the Anthem

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Recommended: Chapter 6 social structure theories

In view of some people, the United States is the country of rich, prosperous, civilized, and equal. And people living in such a country certainly have a good mental and physical life. It looks like a promised land, a heaven of lots of people. However, we will find some differences as reading the short story "The Cop and The Anthem" of O. Henry. In this story, he reflected a double life of the society in this country. He wrote about the lives of poor and tramp people in New York as well as the way the homeless in the city think of the prison.

The character Soapy in the story may be represented to the poor, the homeless in city. His home, his place is a bench in the part and it seems that he is facing to problem of the winter is coming soon. How to find a winter quarter? He tried in vain to get arrested, get imprisoned for a purpose of a wealthy condition in goal where he could eat some foods and had a bed in which he can fall on fast asleep. However, when he decided to live better in a normal way he got arrested for a simple crime; loitering. What does the writer want to convey to readers in mass incidents? He used the art of irony to make a bitter sarcasm about life of people in the city.

O. Henry used an art of irony, an irony of life, by showing mass bad actions of Soapy in purpose being imprison but it's unsuccessful. People seem not escape from destiny that's what happened to the main character of the story. To look for a place seems so difficult and it looks an ambition "A hibernatorial ambition of Soapy was not the highest." "Three months on the Island was what his soul craved." O. Henry makes the irony of life in the image of Soapy tries to get arrested by taking an umbrella from a man but the man just thought it's him being the owner. Yet, when he decides to get a job and becomes someone in the world, when he gets arrested. His purpose now is successful but it has no long meaning because at this moment he does not want to be so. The image of the Island is not his craved any more. Why the writer uses the image of Island to mention the prison?

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