The Bugle

The Bugle is the student newspaper of Placerville High School, a publication that appears in the narrative as a symbol of the school's mundane institutional life and the bureaucratic normalcy that Charles Decker has come to despise. When Decker enters Principal Thomas Denver's office for the meeting that will seal his expulsion, Denver is reading The Bugle, the school rag, as Decker describes it. The principal puts the paper down to address Decker, and later, after their explosive confrontation, Decker sarcastically suggests that Denver might have expected their meeting to conclude with a literary critique of The Bugle rather than with Decker's psychological assault and expulsion. The newspaper thus serves as a prop in the power struggle between student and administrator, representing the trivial, orderly world that Decker is about to shatter. Its presence in the scene underscores the chasm between Denver's routine, procedural approach to discipline and Decker's radical, personal attack on the principal's authority. The Bugle is never mentioned again after this scene, its function complete as a marker of the ordinary school life that the hostage crisis will permanently destroy.