Essential to a full appreciation of The Contender is an understanding of Lipsyte’s use of setting. The world in which Alfred lives is Harlem, a predominantly black community on the northern end of Manhattan in New York City. Within the context of the novel, Lipsyte introduces various aspects of Harlem as well as other locations around the city. Lipsyte uses these settings as major symbols. Each setting represents a different side of life and affects Alfred in its own way.
When Alfred first appears in the novel, he is on the front steps of the building that houses his Aunt Pearl’s apartment. Before him are the mean streets of Harlem. The atmosphere is repressive. The sun, often a literary symbol of hope or promise, melts into the despair of a “dirty gray Harlem sky.” The air is “sour,” rancid, and foul. Young men without direction gather on street corners, drifting, waiting for something to happen. Cars crunch through garbage and broken glass. Packs of children, “ragged and skinny,” have empty beer cans for toys. The sights and sounds echo the sense of the backdrop that Lipsyte paints. This is the world that dominates Alfred’s life. His struggle will be to overcome the repression. Initially, Alfred thinks he can do this only by escaping Harlem.
Aunt Pearl’s apartment offers some security, but it can’t compare to Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Wilson’s suburban home in Queens. Dorothy’s home represents the flight of the black middle class away from Harlem and into the suburbs after World War II. The streets are clean and grassy, lined with attractive houses. The food is abundant and good. Wilson discourages concern for those left behind in the inner-city. When Alfred returns to Harlem, the streets seem dirtier, the apartment smaller. The plaster cracks over the kitchen sink. A roach scurries across the cabinet. Addicts scuffle in the hall. Alfred sleeps in a fold-up bed. At this point, Alfred yearns for escape.
Knowing no better way, Alfred and his best friend, James, have spent much of their childhood trying to escape their lives through fantasy. The movie theater symbolizes an important means of escape for the boys. While watching a movie, they can enter a world of action and adventure. Interestingly, they often side with the hero’s adversaries. Identifying with the underdogs, they cheer for the Indians to defeat the cowboys and for the monsters to prevail. On the streets, Alfred also sees men whom he admires, adults with suave manners and sophisticated ways, like the characters he sees in the movies. When a pretty girl his age sits beside him on the subway in Chapter 4, he longs for some kind of crisis so the he can come to her rescue, introducing himself as the leading man might in a movie: “I’m Alfred Brooks, may I be of service?”
Television serves as another means of escape for Alfred. On television, Alfred sees more of the fantasy world beyond Harlem: a speeding stagecoach, shooting Indians, “Uncle Harry” on a children’s show greeting the “Kiddie Klubbers.” The people on television are almost always white, and they live in a world foreign to Alfred. In Chapter 2, he watches a white family whose mother is pretty and slim and whose husband is tall and handsome. Their kitchen is shiny and as big as Aunt Pearl’s entire apartment. The dog, Gus, can romp across a huge lawn under trees. Little Billy, their son, secretly builds a robot in the garage. At seventeen, Alfred is skeptical about the accuracy of the depiction, but he wonders if some people really do live that way.
Much of Alfred and James’ dreaming is shared at a secret cave that James discovered in the park as a young boy while rock hunting. He had a book about rocks and wanted to save the best ones to show at school. When James took the rocks home, however, his drunken father dumped them all down the air shaft in their apartment. At that moment, it is as though James’ dreams were dumped down the air shaft as well. One of James’ dreams was to be an engineer and build great things. But James allows himself to believe Major and Hollis when they tell him that “the white man” would never allow him to build anything but garbage heaps.
The cave is a safe place for James and Alfred, a symbolic haven from the mean streets and bullies like Major who steal whatever small change the boys have. Near the end of the novel, when James is seriously injured and running from the police, Alfred knows that he can find his old friend hiding in the cave. As boys, they spun their dreams in solitude there. Some of their fantasies may have been unrealistic, but at least Alfred and James had hope. James doesn’t have much hope left as the novel opens; his hopes and dreams have been dashed by people like his father and Major and the gang.
