Little by little, the rancher has to yield ground, therefore there is an ironic reversal of the master-slave relationship. Consequently, he forces his conditions upon Curt who gets more and more dependent on him. He can’t put up with intolerance and racism. He objects to being called boy or nigger as in antebellum days and reminds his employer that those days are over. Nevertheless, he intends to assert his rights. Born a slave, Bubba is now free, yet he still suffers from the prejudices that prevail. Bubba makes the right decisions, which ridicules Curt’s position as a boss. Once his goal is set, he gets organized to find Sadie, which implicitly gives him a higher status than Curt’s own. Unlike his boss, he is resolute and courageous. He is a simpleton in a mock epic.Ĥ Curt’s counter model is Bubba, the best tracker in the country. All in all, he is a flawed character even an anti-hero. He shows neither grandeur nor self-respect in the face of danger. Petty, mean, despicable, he is cowardly and passive. He is quite the reverse of the noble-hearted cowboy. The image Curt has of himself is quite inconsistent with what he actually is. What is not white Anglo-Saxon is regarded dangerous and causes him to experience fear and anxiety. Curt is also the typical racist prejudiced against Blacks, Indians and Jews. Actually, he is more interested in the reward he can get for catching the kidnappers than in Sadie. He nearly forgets his wife after spending a moment with Loretta, a whore. He is self-centered and devoid of moral sense. When Bubba demands that he take care of the young orphan when he/she is in jeopardy he doesn’t show any generosity. When Jake asks him for help, his first reaction is to refuse. He is congratulated for killing a very bad man, but he forgets to say that the killer is Bubba, not he himself. He tells us he saved Greenfeld from being lynched by a mean poker playet but he lies. For instance, he can’t tell a lady from a prostitute, or he believes Greenfeld isn’t Jewish since he hasn’t got: horns (like Moses).ģ So, Curt is a western embodiment of the alazon in Greek comedy. He fancies himself smart but is consistently stupid or gullible. He postures as a strong cowboy yet he is nothing but a weakling. He is the feckless braggart who had rather stand aside than assail the band that have set fire to his homestead and abducted his wife. say somethin’” to the outlaws for taking his wife away. Curt claims to be a real cowboy, a tough fellow, but from the very beginning what he says points in the other direction. Curt and Bubba play the major parts in the novel.
#Pokerth players are mostly dumb niggers movie#
Those minor characters seem to have been freshly borrowed from the dichotomous world of movie studios. Most characters are deliberately conceived as two-dimensional stock characters or stereotypes: cowboys, ranchers, storekeepers, saloon owners, poker players, Kansas City whores, clergymen, a black pianist, a stagecoach driver, a Jewish pedlar. Satire requires a whole gamut of comic devices to achieve the purpose of a novelist who also proves to be a committed writer.Ģ All the elements of traditional westerns or yellow backs can be found in God ’ s Country: wide expanses of desert land, Indian settlements, army camps. The latter, together with Curt, the rancher who tells the story in his own words, painting himself as the main hero, are involved in a succession of adventures meant to entertain the reader but also to satirize most of the characters. In this novel, a whole range of bad guys are portrayed whereas just a handful of men appear to be good guys: Jake, a young orphan of fifteen, Limbo, the trading-post owner, and, above all, Bubba. They set out for the Wild West in 1871, in the days of the Indian Wars.
Curt decides to hire a scout, Bubba, a black man, to help him find her. When Sadie, his wife, is kidnapped by a gang of outlaws. All page references are included in the text in square bracke (.)ġ God ’ s Country 1 is the story of Curt Marder, a white cowboy/rancher who is also the first-person narrator. 1 Winchester, Ma., Faber & Faber, 1994.
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