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The Luck Of Ginger Coffey Essay

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In Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey, the city of Montreal is depicted as being in a kind of stasis, its landscape and inhabitants repeatedly described as frozen and stagnant: “Four forty-five. Office workers, waiting release as the minute hand moved slowly towards the hour, looked at the darkness beyond their windows and saw edges of frosting begin to mist the panes” (Moore 117). Despite this passage’s emphasis on stillness, however, it nevertheless features two references to time. Throughout Moore’s novel, attention is repeatedly paid to specific times or time frames, complicating the underlying image of Montreal as a city averse to progress. Considering the subjectiveness of the third-person limited narration, it seems best to examine …show more content…

Throughout the text, the people that Ginger notices and that the narrator describes are defined entirely by their profession, for instance “a policeman . . . halting traffic to let Coffey cross” (3), or “the smashing blond receptionist” (10). In fact Coffey claims that he would only consider himself to be a man of quality when he could be called “J.F. Coffey, Journalist” (182). By defining people by their job titles, the narrator aligns himself with Coffey’s idea that in the land of opportunity, people are in fact defined by the opportunities that they are presented with and that are …show more content…

The profession of the contemporary newspaper typist saw a change in corporate culture wherein the clock became a powerful object, owned only by the foreman and governing the employees. It seems, however, that Moore’s depiction of time is more appropriately a reflection of Ginger’s fixation on the myth of the new world as a land of boundless opportunity. Indeed, the clock does seem to be independent of the diurnal cycle: “As [Coffey] started off, the sun moved west, unadmitted by the pall clouds which all day had curtained the frozen river and the city islanded within it . . . Four forty-five” (117). This image of the sun being blocked from the city by clouds demonstrates the city’s apparent ignorance for the sun’s position in the sky, yet the passage continues on, repeatedly referring to the passing minutes as Coffey makes his way to the Tribune. One thing that time does not seem so independent from, however, is the lives of the office workers in the financial district, “waiting release as the minute hand moved slowly towards the hour” (117). At “five o’clock . . . down came the office workers, spilling out into the streets” (117); at “five-thirty . . . [another] policeman . . . invited Coffey to cross [the street]” (117). In this passage, the connection between time and nature has been completely severed and time has become reappropriated as

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