Not everybody is so opposed to the modernisation of the city as some of the residents of Manhattan. The factory owners, the people in charge of construction, drivers and builders and architects surely would have been thrilled at the prospect of the city continuing to grow and, thus, provide more and more work. Real estate agents would most certainly have been on the side of progress as migration increased and property values soared. The real estate agent Mr Perry speaks with is in the business of marketing Manhattan as vibrant and full of possibility. Investing in property in the city would be a financial boon, he suggests to his unsure client, with values set to double in six months, before proselytising thus:
Now that we are a part of New York, the second city in…show more content… The epigraph to ‘Dollars’, which this essay has already touched upon, is one example of this kind of contrast between epigraph and text. Another is the epigraph to ‘Steamroller’, which tells a somewhat quiet, calm tale of a city night. The sensory is invoked again, in particular the visual, as the epigraph describes how the evening “crushes bright milk out of arclights […] until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. (108) There is a sense of a peaceful metropolis, until the chapter begins immediately underneath: “A steamroller was clattering back and forth over the freshly tarred metaling of the road […] A smell of scorched grease and steam and hot paint came from it”. The narrative is instantly loud and foetid again, an assault on the senses much like when we see Jimmy in his bed, and the sentences are structured more rigidly than those of the flowing, delicately worded epigraph. The epigraphs act almost in the way of a film trailer, giving a sense of what may be to come but leaving out the graphic details, the hidden aspects and minutiae that are woven in to the
