Revolutionary Road: Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Frank was first brought to see the Knox Building in New York City by his father Earl in 1935 when he was ten. A man at the Home Office named Oat Fields had invited Earl and Frank to the office for luncheon and a baseball game at Yankee stadium. Frank had been so nervous that he nearly vomited the morning of the trip. At the Knox Building, his father paused to explain the machines in the display room. Frank was impressed by his reflection in the plate glass and the building’s staggering height. The rest of the day had been disappointing, though: watching the enormously fat Oat Fields eat sloppily disgusted Frank, and the ball game bored him. On the way home, Earl reprimanded Frank for failing to thank Oat Fields, and Frank saw his father anxiously touching his genitals on the subway. That night Frank vomited into the toilet, remembering watching Oat Fields eat.

Only later did Frank piece together that his father had been under consideration to be Oat Fields’s assistant, having clung to his job as a branch assistant-manager through the many layoffs of the Depression, but had learned that day during their trip that the promotion was not happening. This disappointment had been the beginning of Earl’s decline. He had been demoted to a regular salesman and his health weakened, his wife had aged, and he was horrified by Frank’s behavior. Frank took jobs that didn’t require any education and tortured his mother by failing to write for eight months, and then sending a letter without a return address, announcing he had gotten married.

Earl would not have understood how it happened that Frank came to work at Knox Business Machines. Frank had told a classmate he needed a job because April was “knocked up.” He expressly asked for a boring job, saying he wanted to preserve a separate identity until he figured out what he really wanted to do. Knox had been on the list of employers the classmate showed him. Frank had gotten the job without mentioning that his father had worked for Knox. He thought of his job as a hilarious joke, doing boring work he didn’t care about and putting in no effort, but it was a joke that no one else seemed to understand. Eventually he stopped explaining it to other people, only saying “he didn’t do anything, really” but had “the dullest job you could possibly imagine.”

The Monday after April’s performance, Frank enters the Knox building and makes his way up the elevator to the fifteenth floor automatically. Sometimes he feels aware that he does take some pleasure in the routines of the office. As Frank walks to his desk, Maureen Grube greets him and he thinks about sleeping with her. He asks himself, “why not?” He thinks that she has been encouraging him for months, and she probably lives somewhere with a roommate who is out all day long, which will make the logistics easy.

Reaching his desk, Frank listens to his officemate Jack Ordway tell him about the weekend that has left him too hungover to work. His wife’s friends had come to town and they had drunk cocktail after cocktail. Ordway is an alcoholic who married a rich woman and used up her inheritance. Although others in the office think Jack’s life sounds glamorous, Frank has met Jack’s wife and knows that she is discontent, and blames Jack for ruining her life.

Frank begins to look through the papers on his desk, sorting them into piles without reading them and marking them to be filed away and returned to him later by a secretary. After going to coffee with several coworkers, Frank looks at a letter addressed to him by a branch manager in Toledo about a badly written pamphlet full of errors. The branch manager needs a better pamphlet to distribute at an important upcoming conference. This gives Frank an idea: he goes to Maureen Grube’s desk and, showing her the pamphlet, asks her if she can help him locate files so that he can rework the pamphlet. He takes her into the archives and looks at her face: she is not very pretty, but if he ignores her imperfections he finds her very desirable. He tells her he will stop back in to see how she is doing.

Frank goes back to his cubicle and thinks over his plan. He will go back to Maureen once most of the office has gone to lunch, and ask her to lunch. Ordway approaches to ask him to go to lunch, and Frank says he can’t, disappointing Ordway. After waiting a bit, Frank returns and asks Maureen to lunch. She agrees and he goes to the elevator to wait for her, where he worries that his coworkers will return before they get out of the building. Outside the building, he thinks he catches a glimpse of his office friends as he ducks into a cab after Maureen, but he feels giddy with excitement and doesn’t care.