Dick’s envy and resentment

Dick’s envy and resentment are a recurring pattern in which other people’s possessions and apparent good fortune become a personal grievance. The narrative traces that pattern from a childhood act of theft to his fixation on a wealthy stranger at the Fontainebleau, showing how envy shapes both his sense of deprivation and his fantasies of power.

A Habit of Envy

After avoiding a conversation with Perry about the Kansas murders, Dick walks along the surf-drenched shore, collecting seashells. The simple act recalls a childhood episode: a neighbor’s son had returned from a Gulf Coast holiday with a box of shells, and Dick envied him so fiercely that he stole the shells and crushed them one by one with a hammer. The memory makes the present-day collecting more than an incidental pastime; shells are at once the object he once resented and the small treasure he now gathers for himself.

The narration presents this impulse as broader than a single childhood grievance. Dick’s envy is constant, and he treats as an enemy anyone who possesses something he wants or embodies someone he wishes he could be. His resentment therefore attaches not only to particular objects but also to other people’s apparent advantages. The childhood shells establish an early pattern of turning another person’s pleasure into an affront—and answering that affront through destruction.

The Fontainebleau as a Picture of What He Lacks

On the second day in Miami, Dick suggests that he and Perry enter the Fontainebleau and try to meet wealthy women. Perry is reluctant, concerned that their khaki trousers and T-shirts will attract attention, but their tour of the hotel goes unnoticed. They linger in its lobby and garden and lounge by the swimming pool, moving through a world of men in candy-striped raw-silk Bermuda shorts and women wearing bathing suits with mink stoles.

At the pool Dick notices a man about his own age, perhaps twenty-eight or thirty. Dick cannot identify him: he might be a gambler, lawyer, or gangster from Chicago. What matters to Dick is the life the stranger appears to possess. A blonde resembling Marilyn Monroe rubs suntan oil on him, while his ringed hand reaches for iced orange juice. The scene gathers money, leisure, and female attention into a single image of ease. Dick sees these advantages as belonging, in some sense, to him, though he believes he will never have them.

Resentment and the Fantasy of Power

The stranger’s apparent good fortune provokes Dick to ask himself why the man should have everything while he has nothing. His envy sharpens into a judgment that the stranger has been favored by luck, and into the conviction that men like him should be wary. Dick imagines that, with a knife, he has power over the people whose lives he covets; he pictures opening one of them up and letting his luck spill out. The fantasy does not change the stranger’s position or Dick’s own, but it briefly recasts deprivation as the possibility of control.

The blonde intensifies the effect of the scene. Dick’s day is ruined by seeing her rub the man with suntan oil, and he tells Perry that they should leave. The abrupt departure makes the limits of his imagined power plain: he can turn resentment into a violent image, but in this encounter he can only withdraw from the spectacle that has provoked him.

The Pattern’s Significance

The shell memory and the hotel episode echo each other through possession and frustrated desire. As a boy, Dick answers another child’s prized shells by stealing and smashing them; at the Fontainebleau, he confronts an adult version of the same imbalance, now expressed through wealth, leisure, and attention. In both cases, someone else’s enjoyment becomes inseparable from Dick’s sense of being denied.

The narrative’s movement from the quiet shoreline to the glittering poolside contrast also gives the pattern a visible scale: a box of seashells and a man’s ringed hand mark very different kinds of possession, yet both awaken the same grievance. Dick’s resentment turns envy outward, casting the fortunate stranger as an adversary and imagining violence as a way to recover power. The episode presents that fantasy as a feature of his outlook, not as an act carried out against the man.