In addition to being inordinately ambitious, there is a bit of a daredevil in Tom. Most men would not dare to climb out of a window eleven stories above the street and creep sideways along a ledge which can't be more then eleven inches wide. It is not quite as wide as the length if Tom's shoe. Furthermore, it is an old building. The ledge might give way at any place under his weight. After all, it is nothing but old concrete. We see that the apartment-window has deteriorated over the years. How do we know that other parts of the building haven't deteriorated as well. How do we know that one of the bricks he is clinging to won't come loose and send him falling backward grasping at the empty air? Still, we want Tom to climb out that window. We want to share in his adventure--but only, of course, vicariously. That is the appeal of the story. We the readers imagine ourselves out there on that ledge and know the fear of falling, the temptation to fall, and the thrill of falling. We have stood on high places looking down, and we know how the devil himself seems to be whispering in our ear, "Why don't you jump? Go ahead! Jump!"
Tom seems to be the very symbol of ambition. There he is a young upwardly mobile man who looks as if he is trying to climb a skyscraper. We can imagine young men like him all over Manhattan, all trying to climb those tall buildings to get to the upper-level suites. The city itself seems to bring out the daredevil in some people. Tom knows that what he is doing is madness--but how can we be sure that whatever it is we are doing in life isn't madness too?
In addition to inferring that Tom is a bit of a daredevil and a bit mad, it seems inferrable that he has become mentally exhausted from allowing his dreams of glory to turn him into a workaholic. He knows he could salvage his basic idea for a marketing proposal and start all over again collecting brand-new evidence to support it. But he is brain-weary. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. He just can't face the prospect of doing all that tedious work again. Maybe he doesn't even belong in the wholesale grocery business. Who does? He would rather risk his life to retrieve that piece of yellow paper. He attaches too much importance to it. It isn't facts it represents but hours of his time, hours of his life, hours of neglect of his beautiful young wife. And he was so close to being done with his project! The story opens with these words:
At the little living-room desk Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable. Interoffice Memo, the top sheet was headed, and he typed tomorrow's date just below this...
By tomorrow morning he would have been able to take that Interoffice Memo to his office and present it. And how does he know that another round of research and observation would lead to the same conclusions? We can infer that once he was inspired and confident, but now he doesn't feel the same anymore. He doesn't have the faith in his big idea that he used to have. Ideas have a way of getting stale. We might infer that Tom is getting a little bit sick and tired of his marketing proposal and just wants to get rid of it in order to free his mind for new and perhaps bigger and better ideas.
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