Burke Devore—Upton “Ralph” Fallon employment rivalry

Burke Devore—Upton “Ralph” Fallon employment rivalry is the moment Burke turns an abstract struggle against unemployment into a plan focused on one identifiable man. A trade article names Fallon as the production-line manager at Arcadia Processing, and Burke decides that Fallon occupies the job he should have. His imagined route to employment quickly becomes a murderous fantasy, but its collapse also reveals the rivalry’s larger scale: even if Fallon were gone, Burke would still face the stack of résumés and a shrinking market for middle managers.

Identity and Emergence

Burke encounters Fallon not in person but through an article in Pulp about Arcadia Processing, a successful company in Arcadia, New York. After months of unemployment have left Burke struggling even to send out his own résumés, the trade piece catches his attention. He reads it slowly, underlines sentences, and treats keeping current with the paper industry as a necessary defense against becoming professionally obsolete. The article’s account of a thriving business therefore brings both renewed attention and a personal threat.

Arcadia Processing is a wholly owned subsidiary of a large American paper company, but its success has allowed it to avoid the parent company’s interference. The plant had long made cigarette paper from tobacco scraps, a difficult material because its fibers are short. It later diversified into polymer paper, the specialty Burke had worked on for sixteen years at Halcyon Mills. Rather than challenge established producers directly, Arcadia developed overseas customers: aided by NAFTA, it sold to Mexican manufacturers and expanded into South America. The success story is bittersweet for Burke, whose own experience in that product area makes the company’s achievement a reminder of work he can no longer claim.

The article identifies Fallon as the production-line manager and describes him answering questions about the process and his background. Known by his middle name, Ralph, he had worked at Arcadia for almost thirty years, apparently beginning on the tobacco-paper machine straight out of high school. Burke has no résumé or photograph to examine, but he reads the article’s limited details as enough to judge Fallon. He concludes that he is more qualified and would win a fair contest for the position; the painful contradiction, as Burke sees it, is that Fallon already holds the job.

From Job Competition to Murderous Fantasy

Burke’s reasoning turns the vacancy he wants into an imagined consequence of Fallon’s removal. He daydreams that Fallon might be fired for misconduct, become too ill to work, or die. He then asks whether the company would welcome a more qualified replacement and answers his own question with the possibility that he could kill Fallon. The thought first appears to him as hyperbole, but he returns to it seriously, linking the fantasy to his stopped income, mortgage, household expenses, and the costs of Betsy’s college education and Billy’s approaching graduation from high school.

Burke frames the imagined killing as self-defense: he does not know Fallon, and he casts the man as an obstacle between his family and financial ruin. This justification makes the rivalry more than professional resentment. Burke converts the consequences of unemployment into an immediate personal threat, then treats violence against a stranger as a possible means of protecting his household. His certainty that he deserves the job rests on his own comparison of their qualifications, not on any actual encounter or competitive selection process between them.

The fantasy acquires a concrete instrument when Burke remembers the Luger pistol at the bottom of his father’s trunk. He imagines driving to Arcadia with the gun, finding Fallon, following him, waiting for an opportunity, killing him, and applying for his position. The sequence gives the thought a procedural shape, but it remains a daydream in this passage. The decisive interruption is Burke’s recognition that the plan would not deliver the security he imagines.

The Rivalry’s Larger Field

Burke sees that eliminating Fallon would not end the competition. Once the position was open, he would have to compete against the résumés already stacked before him. His conviction that he would defeat Fallon in a fair contest is therefore set against a more discouraging reality: the job market is not a two-person contest, and a vacancy does not guarantee that Burke will be selected. This recognition breaks the daydream and returns him to misery rather than providing a workable solution.

The book later places Fallon’s position within a broader account of technological change. Burke describes computers as replacing managers and supervisors as earlier automation displaced factory workers. In his account, middle managers had transmitted orders and requirements downward, reports of work completed upward, and information between production, suppliers, and distributors. Computers can perform much of that coordinating function, leaving fewer management positions even at companies that remain profitable. The resulting dismissals can strengthen companies and increase returns to investors while making experienced managers such as Burke unnecessary.

Fallon’s job nevertheless still exists: a person or two are needed to run the production line and communicate between workers and senior management. That surviving role makes Fallon a genuine competitor in Burke’s eyes, but not the only one. Burke expands the threat from the six résumés he has pulled from the stack to the much larger population of displaced, educated, middle-aged, middle-class managers he expects to seek the few remaining positions. Fallon is the immediate target of his fantasy; mass competition is the condition that makes the target appear consequential.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Burke’s account moves from professional judgment to imagined violence and then to a correction grounded in the hiring market. He first treats Fallon as the single barrier between himself and safety, assigns himself superiority, and imagines that killing the incumbent would make the job available. He then understands that removing one person would leave the underlying contest intact. The shift does not undo the murderous thought; instead, it shows how Burke’s private logic is driven by a broader and more persistent fear of exclusion.

That fear also propels the narrative onward. Burke concludes that he must secure a place before the anticipated flood of unemployed managers becomes overwhelming, and he resolves to be strong, determined, and quick. He identifies Everett Boyd Dynes as the person he must find next. Fallon’s role in the rivalry is thus both specific and structural: he occupies a job Burke covets, while the shrinking supply of management work turns that job into one visible point in a much wider struggle. The episode establishes Burke’s tendency to translate economic insecurity into a personal contest, even as he recognizes that one rival’s disappearance cannot by itself resolve the crisis.