25 pages • 50 minutes read
Jack LondonA Piece of Steak
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1909A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Cost and Benefit of Aging
Jack London juxtaposes age and youth throughout the text. Tom is an aging boxer who remembers his glory days and sees Sandel as the new version of him. Mostly, Tom views the world as unfair to the aging. He notes early on that “[H]e [is] an old un, and the world [does] not wag well with old uns” (5). Part of the problem for Tom, of course, is that his age comes with poverty. However, poverty merely exacerbates the wear and tear of life itself. Tom’s boxing past makes it particularly hard for him to get work. He’s too old to learn a trade and too tired out to win a fight or do the navy work (or other physical labor) for which he might otherwise have been suited.
Sandel, on the other hand, symbolizes “Youth, glorious Youth, rising exultant and invincible, supple of muscle and silken of skin, with heart and lungs that had never been tired and torn and that laughed at limitation of effort” (6). Tom himself used to be this embodiment of youth—a fighter who made his name by putting “the old uns” away (6). Sandel, as the young fighter, will be able to rise in the ranks the same way Tom did: by beating men like Tom, the old guard blocking the path to fame and riches. Sandel, like Tom in his youth, has no challenges in his life beyond winning a fight and using his young body as it was meant to be used. However, the text implies that Sandel is inessential to the story—any young fighter could take his place and have the same effect on Tom. Tom knows that “Youth [is] ever youthful” and that “it [is] only Age that [grows] old” (6). That is, there will always be a young fighter to fight the old. This echoes the work’s naturalist ideas: The pressures that shape life in the wild—in particular, the evolutionary “uselessness” of an animal that has fulfilled and aged beyond its reproductive purpose—also shape human society.
Still, there is something about Sandel that intrigues Tom, for he sees Sandel as literally “Youth incarnate” and is fascinated by his “white satin skin,” which covers “muscles that slip[] and slid[e] like live things” (8). In the ring too, Sandel proves to be a worthy opponent, landing quick blow after quick blow on Tom. But age comes with something that youth does not: experience and wisdom. Tom can see that Sandel’s blows are “too quick and too deft to be dangerous,” with Sandel rushing things and “expending [youth’s] splendor and excellence in wild insurgence and furious onslaught” (9). Tom, on the other hand, “knew his business […] now that Youth was no longer his” (9). His wisdom seems to pay off for a time in the fight, as Tom (and age) almost beat Sandel (and youth). In the end, Tom’s age and poverty prevent him from landing a powerful enough blow on Sandel. Still, Tom notes that Sandel will never be a “world champion” because he “lack[s] the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it [is] to buy it with Youth” (12). Age brings with it wisdom but costs the power and energy of youth, the necessary ingredients for winning a fight. The story thus expresses a deep pessimism regarding the human condition, suggesting that people are perpetually and inevitably out of step with what life demands of them.
The Cyclical Reality of the Survival of the Fittest
Throughout the text, London describes Tom in animalistic language that highlights social Darwinist ideas such as survival of the fittest. Tom’s journey to the Gayety, for instance, resembles a journey “into the night to get meat for his mate and cubs—not like a modern working-man going to his machine grind, but in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it” (4). Similarly, he himself has eyes that are “lion-like—the eyes of a fighting animal” (1), and like a lion fighting for survival in the wild, Tom literally fights to survive in the ring, only to lose to the younger, stronger opponent. Tom comes close to beating Sandel, of course. There’s even a moment when Sandel is “balanced on the hair line between defeat or survival” (16). In the end, however, Tom is left with no power at all, only “a fighting intelligence that [is] dimmed and clouded from exhaustion” (16). In the ring, as in nature, only the strong can survive, and defeat is absolute: since Tom has already had to spend his advance, he walks away from the fight with nothing.
Ultimately, then, the reason Tom fails is not that he is unfit—although he clearly is not as fit as Sandel is—but simply because of the circle of life. Tom knows that youth will always beat age. His own mantra is that “youth will be served” (14), a saying he remembers hearing for the first time the night he, as a young fighter, beat another old lion, Stowsher Bill. Only in his old age does he understand what that means—that the young will always beat the old when it comes to feats of strength. Just as Sandel defeats Tom, Tom similarly rose to be king of the ring (his name, Tom King, is no coincidence) and the jungle by beating up old-timers like Stowsher Bill. And just as Bill was left crying in the dressing room, so too is Tom left in tears, now able to “understand […] why Bill had cried in the dressing-room” and feel sorry for him (18).
The story thus depicts the gradual wearing down of bodies in the face of life’s difficult struggles. However, life itself will endure as new generations rise up and then fall, completing the cycle eternally. Twenty years after “A Piece of Steak” takes place, Sandel will similarly be starving as he loses a fight to a man whose body is fresh fodder for the slaughter of the world.
The Self-Sustaining Cycle of Poverty
Despite Tom’s age, “A Piece of Steak” suggests that he might still have one more fight in him if not for the crushing reality of poverty. At the beginning of the story, Tom is eating dinner while his family goes without, but even his dinner is not satiating. It is a simple meal of bread and flour gravy, as his wife has been unable to procure steak on credit. Though he used to eat steak whenever he wanted (indeed, he had so much of it that he could feed extra steaks to his dog), now he cannot get it when he needs it most: “[O]ld men, fighting before second-rate clubs, couldn't expect to run bills of any size with the tradesmen” (3). Tom also cannot provide adequate training for himself: He cannot afford a sparring partner, nor even fare to ride to the arena. Instead, he has to walk two miles, tiring himself out more than he ought to before a big fight. At one point, he is close to defeating Sandel, but he cannot muster enough power in the punch. He thinks to himself, “Ah, that piece of steak would have done it! He had lacked just that for the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of steak” (17). Thus, hunger has caused him to lose the fight that would’ve covered his bills and prevented more hunger in the future.
In the story, poverty is a self-fulfilling cycle. Tom cannot win a fight, so he cannot afford to eat. Because he cannot afford to eat, he cannot win a fight. And because he loses the fight and his body is so badly broken from years of fighting, he knows he cannot really work a job that would allow him to break the cycle of poverty. The only work he’s suited for is digging trenches and roads, but he knows that he cannot even do that for a time: “[It]t would be a week before he could grip a pick handle or a shovel (18). Besides, economic conditions make it hard to find work to begin with: “[I]t [is] a drought year in Australia, [and] times [are] hard” (3). One leaves the story convinced Tom will have no choice but to starve until the next fight and try once again to beat an unbeatable foe: time itself.
More broadly, the story implies that Tom’s plight is that of most members of the working class, who similarly will never be able to break out of the cycle of poverty and find any kind of success beyond mere survival. The laws that determine success in the wild also determine success in a capitalist society, where the majority of the population competes for limited resources. Although social Darwinists sometimes used evolutionary theory to justify this inequality as the natural order of things, London, as a socialist, is more critical: Darwinism may describe the mechanisms of capitalism, but it does not necessarily excuse it. In fact, capitalist society compares unfavorably to the natural world when Tom reflects that he is earning his way (or trying to) “not like a modern working-man going to his machine grind, but in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it” (4). There is a sense that nature, brutal as it can be, is at least honest in a way that human society is not; where both demand that people struggle to survive, ordinary class society does not engage the survival instinct in a direct way, instead “grinding” workers down with mindless, repetitive work.
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