Cheese-Face

Cheese-Face is Martin Eden’s persistent fighting rival, a figure defined in the available scenes by their repeated contests and by the endurance those contests demand of Martin. Though Cheese-Face often wins, Martin’s refusal to run becomes as important to their rivalry as the results of the fights.

A Longstanding Rivalry

Martin recalls that Cheese-Face defeated him again six months after their first fight. Martin managed to blacken Cheese-Face’s eye on that occasion, but the broader pattern remained one of Cheese-Face winning and celebrating while Martin stayed to face him. Martin remembers Cheese-Face as a formidable fighter who showed him no mercy; he draws strength instead from the fact that he never ran away and kept returning to the contest.

The Enquirer Alley Confrontation

Later, Martin goes to the Enquirer alley, where he and Cheese-Face are both sick and neither seems eager to continue. A gang of newsboys watches, making pride a powerful pressure on them both. They fight for twenty minutes under rules that forbid kicking, blows below the belt, and striking a person who is down. Exhausted, Cheese-Face proposes that they call it quits. The spectators’ presence has made stopping difficult, even as the strain of the contest has made continuing difficult.

Recurrence and Significance

The confrontation brings the remembered pattern of defeat into Martin’s present: he recalls having stayed through earlier losses, and that recollection helps sustain him in the alley. The narrative then presents the two rivals renewing the fight. The episode frames their struggle as an elemental contest, set against the suggestion of humanity’s long development; the electric light overhead is the one sign of progress left in the scene. Cheese-Face’s significance lies less in any stated motive or wider personal history than in his role as the opponent through whom Martin repeatedly measures persistence. The supplied passage does not establish the final outcome of this confrontation.