"Pause Information technology Down" is a HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems.

This week, an excerpt from Apex Hides The Hurt, a novel written by Colson Whitehead, was analyzed. The extract comes from Affiliate 2.

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Noon Hides the Hurt analysis– Affiliate two

At get-go he kept his mouth shut because he still saw the job as an interim gig. The unnamed narrator does not take the job every bit a "nomenclature consultant" too seriously. The piece of work environment does not suit him. In his stance, the job is temporary; all the same, the he ends upward being wildly successful and sought after in the field. He wasn't cut out for corporate life. He believed himself to be of a different caliber than those men. Jocky white guys. He didn't need the same things. The inexpensive posturing. The signature colognes. The obscure wafting. The narrator, a blackness homo, does not fit in with his colleagues. The detail sentence demonstrates how the unnamed narrator has different personal values in the world. Even though, in the work environs, he may resemble the men in clothes and speech, internally, his race and social position inform a very different outlook. As a black human in a corporate environment, he is physically different from the men and views the earth from a different vantage bespeak. They scrambled and wanted to be heard past the men who wrote performance reviews and determined bonuses. His colleagues display a level of ambition in the workplace that the unnamed narrator does not. He is non motivated by the financial splendors of corporate America or existence on the "fast track" in his profession. While his colleagues seemed to be guided past blind ambition of having a "corner function," the unnamed narrator takes his time at work in step. They wore suspenders. And then he sat and watched and any names he had he kept to himself. He listened. And if what they came upwards with was terrible, was prosaic, or even more unforgivable, something else'southward proper name, he figured that's the style things work in this crazy task. No skin off his back. Their hapless little creations flopped effectually like fish on asphalt and he couldn't care less. Tension exists between the narrator and how he relates to his colleagues, his bosses, and his task as a whole. The narrator may represent a larger disconnect of young blackness professionals from the day-to-day activities in the piece of work place and how these interactions promote capital letter gains over true intellectual and social development. He does not take the people he works with too serious. He is going through the motions, simply seems to not be fulfilled past the tasks he's supposed to complete at work.