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Mero Corn leaves his childhood home to make his fortune as a soldier, salesman, and politician; he is uninterested in being a cattleman on his family’s ranch. When he travels out of Wyoming, he stops at a restaurant for a steak, but is nauseated by the sight of the bloody meat. From that moment onwards, Mero chooses to become a vegetarian, an incongruous choice for a man who raised cattle in his youth. To Mero, the bloody steak embodies the limited, grim existence he has left behind on the ranch; by forgoing meat, Mero frees himself from his cattleman identity, and makes a new living for himself away from Wyoming. Additionally, the bloody steak echoes the gruesome imagery of the half-skinned steer: both are pieces of nature that have been damaged by man. As such, they embodyand are the result ofthe violent, survivalist dynamic between humans and the natural world.
Bloody Steak Quotes in The Half-Skinned Steer
The The Half-Skinned Steer quotes below all refer to the symbol of Bloody Steak . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Half-Skinned Steer
Quotes
He crossed the state line, hit Cheyenne for the second time in sixty years … That other time he had been painfully hungry, had gone into the restaurant in the Union Pacific station although he was not used to restaurants and ordered a steak, but when the woman brought it and he cut into the meat the blood spread across the white plate and he couldn’t help it, he saw the beast, mouth agape in mute bawling, saw the comic aspects of his revulsion as well, a cattleman gone wrong.
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Bloody Steak Symbol Timeline in The Half-Skinned Steer
The timeline below shows where the symbol Bloody Steak appears in The Half-Skinned Steer. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Half-Skinned Steer
...years. The last time he had visited, he stopped in a restaurant and ordered a bloody steak : the sight of it repulsed him, and he labeled himself a “cattleman gone wrong.”...
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