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.
Character Analysis
Tom King
Tom is the main character of “A Piece of Steak.” He is 40 years old and lives in an apartment in Australia with his wife, Lizzie, and their two children. Tom is a heavyweight boxer who used to be somewhat successful when he was in his prime. Now he’s old and tired, and his body hurts. He moves with slow, “hulking” steps, “as though he were burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles” (1). His knuckles are battered and his veins swollen. He has cauliflower ears, blue-black skin, a hard jaw, and a face covered with bumps from where he has received blows. In the ring Tom is savagely brutal, but in real life he’s not rough at all. In fact, he’s usually quite kind, and when he still had money coming in, he was generous to a fault.
Tom’s life now is marked by poverty. He is behind on rent payment and can afford neither proper training nor the steak he needs to eat in order to have the strength to win a fight. He recognizes that youth has passed him by and that youth usually wins in the ring. As an old man now, he realizes that his glory days consisted of winning fights with past-their-prime heavyweights like himself. He thinks back to one fighter, Stowsher Bill, who cried after losing. At the end of the story, Tom cries too, recognizing that he has become Bill.
The text often describes Tom in animalistic ways, with his humanity emerging mostly in his own thoughts and insights into who he is and who those around him are. With the wisdom of age, he has a strategy to beat Sandel (a strategy that, of course, fails) but no real confidence in his abilities. He is a broken man who forces some optimism that he can win, but the odds are stacked against him due to age and the cyclical oppression of poverty.
Sandel
Sandel is the young fighter from New Zealand who fights Tom. Not much is known about Sandel, as he has never fought in Australia before. If he wins the fight, he will get to fight better bouts with higher purses, so Tom King is something of a gatekeeper for him. Sandel’s character mostly emerges through Tom’s eyes, as the third person limited narration reveals Tom’s thoughts. To Tom, Sandel looks like youth in the flesh. He has a deep chest with solid muscles that seem to be alive under his soft skin.
During the fight, Sandel has far more energy than Tom and wastes a lot of it with superfluous movements. Sandel’s strategy in the fight seems to be to hit fast and furiously in an effort to overwhelm Tom. Tom’s strategy of tiring Sandel out does not work, as Sandel simply has too much energy to expend and is able to regenerate it with ease. Sandel does seem surprised at how difficult Tom is to defeat, as Sandel even gets knocked down a few times. Nevertheless, Sandel wins and works his way up in the boxing world.
In the story, Sandel represents not only youth but also Tom’s past. Tom sees something of himself in Sandel and recognizes the cycle of life: A young boxer will always beat an older one, as youth itself will always “be served.”
Stowsher Bill
Stowsher Bill is an old boxer Tom beat early in his career; after the match, Bill cried in the dressing room. Tom now understands the kinds of problems Bill might have had at home—a family to support, rent to pay, etc.—and sees himself in Bill, even crying on the way home from his fight with Sandel.
The story reveals little else about Stowsher Bill. His purpose is simply to evoke the cycle of life that Tom now recognizes, with Sandel as the new Tom and Tom as the new Bill. Indeed, the motto Tom keeps thinking, “Youth will be served” (14), is one he first heard on the night he fought Bill. Only once he’s become the new Bill does the phrase make sense to Tom.
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