"Ex-Basketball Player"

Poem Review # 118192

English > Analysis
Literature > Poetry

A review of John Updike's poem "Ex-Basketball Player".

1,137 words () | 2 sources | APA | 2009 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses John Updike's poem, "Ex-Basketball Player" and looks at how Updike describes a man who was one the greatest athlete in his town now reduced to pumping gas. From glory to gasoline within the space of a few years--the poem is a thinly veiled warning of the ephemeral nature of the splendor of youth. The paper examines how the poem represents the existential story of a man who lives in a hyperreal world of his own creation and how the life he has created in his mind is as real as the life he once led. The paper concludes that this man is the pinnacle of the postmodern hero in that he lives within his own ideology and that reality is that of the simulacra.

From the Paper:

"In the next stanza, Updike sets the scene at the garage. Flick is obviously a man with an active imagination. He works among the "idiot pumps" with their "rubber elbows hanging loose and low". Flick sees the pumps not as the receptacles that they are, but as a group of opposing teammates. He spends his days in reverie, almost as if he is unaware of the life he is now living. The job allows Flick constant access to his memories but its mundanity is not enough to distract him. He lives his life in a dreamlike stupor where reality cannot intrude. Flick instead lives inside his memories of what he once was--a brilliant high-school athlete. Thus he has become a creature bound by ideology. According to Louis Althusser, "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser 1498). If we accept this theory as correct, we must assume that Flick Webb is an ideological being because his reality is reflected in an imaginary representation of the world."

Sample of Sources Used:

Althusser, L. (1970), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (1971), translated by Ben Brewster.
Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected writings. Cambridge, UK: Polity.