out of his little basement room, and his eyes would be red." (Pg. 26) With a look of weeping, everyone knows that Dick has been reading his Bible. But, somewhere Dick feels deserted. Because God's intangibility prevents Dick from a human companionship, Dick finally gives up his relationship with the Lord. The afternoon before the killings, Dick's Bible lay "face downward on the table," (pg. 28) evidence that he has turned his back on God. Next to his forsaken Bible, Dick's "modern repeating rifle[and] one hundred rounds of ammunition" (pg. 28) lay in view. Still unresolved, Dick finally deserts God and bursts into a fit of violent rage, his last weak attempt to gain esteem.Looking to the whites, blacks, and God, Dick thirsts for acceptance. Unable to find approval, however, Dick finally exhausts his search for consent by a shooting rampage. In the short story "The Child by Tiger," Thomas Wolfe asserts Dick's incapability to gain approval causes his eruption of violence. Because Dick lives as a white man but his skin color marks him as black, Dick never finds a niche. Unknown to Dick, however, the mass murdering not only takes Dick's life, but also causes the townspeople to lose any initial respect they held. Instead of morbid reverence from the townspeople, Ben Pounders "was the proud possessor of another scalp" (Pg. 38) and Nebraska Crane boasts "Yeah - we! We killed a big one! We - we killed a b'ar, we did!" (Pg. 38) Now even further from the acceptance of the townspeople, Dick dies a humiliating death, "hanging in the window of the undertaker's place, for every woman, man, and child in town to see." (Pg. 37)...
