Passage Analysis

“A train pulled into the station, and then all around me there were friends meeting, shaking, then—come here—hugging; wives and husbands greeting, kissing; families huddled together. It didn’t make any sense to me: the smiles, the laughter. They were happy and it seemed bizarre. For he has fallen so low that his knees are beneath the earth, he cannot reach the grapes of the gods, and he can no longer understand the average man. I began to cry”(315-316).

In Leaving Dirty Jersey Salant writes about Jimmy, which is Salant when he is younger, who is a drug addict who had to leave New Jersey to be in a rehabilitation center called GSL (Get Straight for Living). After graduating GSL he started living in Riverside but t was not long after he started doing Crystal Meth and heroin. Throughout Leaving Dirty Jersey Jimmy continues to do drugs and eventually he finds himself in the street begging for money.  In this passage Jimmy reached an all time low and he started to realize it. Jimmy finds himself sitting on the bench in a train station watching the train roll in. The passengers come out happily reuniting with their family and Jimmy sits on the bench, watching, confused. The second part of the quote explains about a man who has fallen so low that “he cannot reach the grapes of the gods…”(316). The passage then goes on to explain how he can’t understand the average man anymore. By the end of this passage the audience as well as Jimmy knows that the man described who has fallen so low is Jimmy, himself. Jimmy realizes how low he has fallen then begins to cry.

At this point in the story Jimmy has reached the lowest point he can in life. The last sentence of this passage shows Jimmy actually starting to break down. Jimmy, in a way, shows defeat like he can no longer live the lifestyle with drugs taking over his life. This is in a way a foreshadow because the audience can assume that Jimmy is actually going to clean up his act and go to GSL as he originally promised to his parents and Wendy. At the end of the passage it shows a hyperbole when James Salant states “For he has fallen so low that his knees are beneath the earth, he cannot reach the grapes of the gods, and he can no longer understand the average man.”(315-316). Jimmy had fallen very low but not as low that his knees were beneath the earth.

The significance of the passage shows Jimmy actually realizing what he had become and how far he has fallen. There is a sense of loneliness with everyone around him who has family or friends greeting them with love and happiness while Jimmy is all alone. Jimmy considers this to be bizarre or in some way weird but then he realized the person who had fallen so low no longer understands the average man. Jimmy could no longer understand the average man making him realize how far he’d fallen.

Word count: 514 (without quote)