Theme Essay on Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets

Theme on Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets - Essay Example hich the readers experience how they lead the author to a dark destiny and they also just become able to peek in the narrator’s psyche that constantly pulls him towards the darkness. In one sense, the streets in the novel are the abstraction of the narrator’s dark path of life, as in the article â€Å"The Use of Sidewalks: Safety† Jacobs comments on how street can be the abstraction: â€Å"A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction†¦.the same might be said off streets...† ( Jacobs 30). But the way how Jacobs deals with the idea of street is different from Piri’s approach to it in the sense that whereas Jacobs views ‘street’ from an optimistic and positive vantage point, the streets in Piri’s novel are the path of destructions. In the novel, Piri notes that â€Å"A twelve-year-old kid walking the streets at 3 a.m. was a nothing sight in Harlem† (6). For Piri, a â€Å"twelve-year-old† kid means th e kid’s lost track. In contrast, a kid on a city sidewalk –that is under proper safety measures- conveys a sort security release. Coming out of Jacobs’s concept of a street, Piri uses it as an abstraction of various culture related oppression, suppression, and discrimination of the early 20th century of American society. In this sense it can be said that if any of the views is taken apart from the other, the socio-cultural notion of a street will remain incomplete; both Jacobs’s and Piri’s views are complementary to each other. In the novel, Piri’s general tendency is to look into the society, first, to find out its anomalies and discrepancies, and then he moves on to reflect them in the portrayal of the city streets. But in an opposite manner, Jacobs, in the first place, focuses the city streets in order depicts the society. To a great extent, Jacobs approach is analogous to a white approach toward the black. It deliberately leaves a scope for an observer to overlook the societal variables that are primarily responsible for the city