A Piece of Steak

“With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way.”

The opening lines of the story center food. Tom alone eats what meager food there is in the house, leaving his wife and children to starve for the night. The description of him savoring the crumbs in a “meditative way” foreshadows the ruminative thoughts Tom has throughout the story while also making it clear Tom’s life is, like the fight, a struggle. 

“Sheer animal that he was, the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him. They were sleepy, lion-like—the eyes of a fighting animal.”

Throughout the text, the narration describes Tom in animalistic ways. He is often compared to a lion—the “king of the jungle,” just as Tom King used to be king of the ring. The zoomorphic imagery helps extend one of the central metaphors of the text: that the world of man is, like the world of nature, a cruel one in which only the strong survive.

“In the ring he struck to hurt, struck to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it. It was a plain business proposition.”

While the story describes Tom as kind and generous in his life outside the ring, he is the opposite when boxing. However, in the real world, Tom seems unable to control anything around him. The ring represents a world he can control: one in which there are rules he understands because both he and every other person there understand clearly that it is a world of conflict and struggle.