43 pages • 1 hour read
Ted ConoverNewjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1999A 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
The Zookeeper
On Conversion Day, Officer Luther tells the recruits: “You’re the zookeeper now [...] Go run the zoo” (94). Throughout the text, Conover himself often uses words that are evocative of animals or barbarism when speaking of the inmates: Conover describes the inmates as “swarming” (11), or how “The pictures of the mob reminded me of news footage from some besieged African capital” (53), or even how inmate Hans Toussaint is “not unlike an ambassador from a small, fierce, and backward land” (168). This imagery reinforces the dehumanization and otherization of the inmates, who are described as scum, savages, or the worst of the worst. Conover constantly enhances the difference between the prison guards and the inmates, depicting Us versus Them in stark terms.
Fire
In the Epilogue, Conover writes about the fires that the prison inmates start during New Year’s Eve. The fire imagery is evocative of rebellions and uprisings, and Conover makes numerous references throughout the text to scenes of inmate resistance. Conover also alludes to the Master-Slave relationship: the prison guards are the zookeepers, the warehouse overseers; they are, in the words of Thomas Osborne, “in an impossible position; for they are not to blame for the system under which their finer qualities have so few chances of being exercised” (198).
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