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.
Symbols & Motifs
Steak
Steak takes on an outsized role in the text. While serving as the title, steak also represents both a need and a luxury item for Tom. On the one hand, he feels he needs the steak to win the fight; on the other, he thinks back to the times when he was a successful fighter and could afford steaks with ease, even feeding them to his dog. Back then, he could have gotten any steak he wanted on credit, whereas on the day of the fight against Sandel, no one will extend Tom this courtesy. Tom seems to understand why, noting that old fighters like him “couldn't expect to run bills of any size” with butchers or any other tradesmen (3). However, after coming so close to beating Sandel only to fail, Tom feels “a great and terrible hatred” for the “butchers who had refused him credit” (14). He notes that a piece of steak would’ve made all the difference to him while being “such a little thing” to the butchers (14). His inability to meet his need for steak becomes an excuse for losing a fight, though when Tom could afford steak, he took it for granted.
Beyond serving as both a need and a desire for Tom, steak has another symbolic meaning in the text. Tom sees meat as something he needs to provide for his family in a primal sense. He imagines, for instance, that he is going “out 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). Meat is something he is supposed to provide for his family, but he cannot even provide it for himself. Steak thus serves as a reminder of the cycle of poverty—Tom cannot get enough food to earn enough money to be able to afford more food and break the cycle. It also underscores the story’s social Darwinism and the basic brutality of human society; significantly, Tom imagines himself winning food by hunting, as though his survival depends on the death of someone else. There is thus an implicit parallel between the steak and the bodies of Tom, Bill, Sandel, and all members of the working class. Whether fighting in the boxing ring or digging canals, the working classes are “meat” for the capitalist economy, which pits individuals against each other in a struggle to survive but ultimately breaks down the bodies of all but the wealthiest.
The Ring
Most of “A Piece of Steak” takes place in the ring, as London goes into a great deal of detail about the fight between Tom and Sandel. But the significance of the ring goes beyond its use as a setting. The ring represents a liminal space in which transformations occur, while also representing a place in which Tom knows his place and his role. It is (ironically, given the sheer violence that occurs there) a source of stability for him in a chaotic world. While Tom cannot provide for his family through work, he still feels he understands the ring. In it, “[H]e struck to hurt, struck to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no animus in it,” as “it was a plain business proposition” (2). For men like Tom, professional fighters, the ring is the only space that is honest about its rules—namely, that the only rules that apply are the savage rules of surviving. As he notes of an earlier victory, the Gouger had not “borne him any ill-will” because it was all part of “the game” that both men knew and “played” (2). The ring has its own rules, but Tom knows the angles. He is happy, for example, to see an old-timer referee, as that referee is likely to let him be “rough” with Sandel “a bit beyond the rules” (7). That is, even in the savageness of the ring, Tom knows that it’s okay to be extra savage and rough if he needs to, as the ring has one rule above all else: The one who wins the fight wins the purse and the glory that comes with it.
There’s another rule of the ring, however: “the iron law of the game” that “a man ha[s] only so many fights in him” (6). Because of this, the ring is a transformative space for Tom. When he enters the ring, he sees only a few familiar faces: the referee and a couple of sports writers. Everyone else in the audience seems to be “kiddies unborn when he was winning his first laurels in the squared ring” (7). In this new environment, Tom is “fascinated” by the “vision of Youth” before him during the preliminary fights (8). Something has changed in him, as he recognizes now that the young always prevail. Over the rest of the story, Tom’s reliance on the usual rules of the ring fails him. He cannot muster enough power and transforms from Tom King into the new version of Stowsher Bill, a man who broke the unspoken rules of the ring by crying after the match.
Blood Vessels
Throughout the text, Tom keeps looking at his hands—specifically, at the veins and arteries in them. He notes early on that boxing has “enlarged” his “arteries and smashed [his] knuckles” (6). He admits he “had never heard that a man's life was the life of his arteries” but now “he [knows] the meaning of those big, upstanding veins” (2). Because he has fought too long at too high a level, he has “pumped too much blood through them at top pressure” (2), leaving them visibly hardened and inelastic. These hardened arteries are one of the clearest signs that his youth has given way to old age—that boxing too long has “made hard knots of muscle out of Youth's sleek suppleness” (6).
During the fight with Standel, Tom thinks again about his arteries. He recognizes that “those upstanding arteries and that sorely tried heart [will] not enable him to gather strength in the intervals between the rounds” the way Sandel can (14). Sandel, he knows, has no visible blood vessels. From across the ring, Tom notes that Sandel’s whole muscular body “[is] acrawl with life” (8). He is youth personified, “with heart and lungs that [have] never been tired and torn and that laugh[] at limitation of effort” (6). As arteries provide blood to the muscles, Tom knows that Sandel will be able to recover more easily during the fight; blood will flow through him much more easily than it does Tom.
Arteries thus serve as a signifier of age and virility. The story implies that all bodies will fail when confronted with the struggles of the world, and the hardening arteries serve as a physical manifestation of that failure. Visible arteries become the clearest indicator of Tom’s deteriorating strength, as his other features—the bumps on the head, the cauliflower ears—signify that he is an experienced but not necessarily aged fighter.
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By Jack London
