Upton “Ralph” Fallon

Upton “Ralph” Fallon is the last employment obstacle Burke Devore identifies between himself and a hoped-for new job. The novel presents him less through personal history than through the position he occupies: Fallon has the mill job Burke lost, and his working schedule makes him difficult for Burke to approach. He becomes the final target in a sequence Burke organizes around résumé competitors, while the available account leaves Fallon’s own character and perspective largely outside view.

Identity and Introduction

Burke refers to Fallon by the initials URF and sometimes by the shortened surname Fallon. His full name also supplies the name of a fabricated companion, Ralph Upton, whom Burke invents as an explanation for his continued absences and activities. The reversed arrangement of the names—Ralph Upton for Upton “Ralph” Fallon—shows how thoroughly Fallon has entered Burke’s planning: even an invented social presence is built out of the name of the person Burke intends to confront.

Fallon is associated with New York State. Burke has seen him once in a luncheonette, enough to recognize him but not enough for the reader to learn a physical description or anything about his temperament. When Burke later studies a telephone book, he finds a listing for U. R. Fallon on County Route 92 in Slate. This is a practical clue in a reconnaissance effort, not a developed portrait of Fallon’s home life or personality.

The Job at the Center of the Rivalry

The conflict begins with the employment position Fallon holds. Burke understands that Fallon is working at the mill in the job Burke considers his own former job. That distinction matters: Fallon is not introduced as the cause of the layoffs or as someone who personally dismissed Burke. He is the person now occupying a role that Burke links to his lost livelihood and desired return to work.

Burke’s sense of grievance has a concrete industrial background. Halcyon Mills reduced its workforce at the Belial mill from 2,100 people to 1,575, while Burke’s product line was discontinued and Machine No. 11 sold for scrap. Burke had spent twenty years at the company—four as sales director and sixteen as product manager—and received notice in October 1995. He initially had five months before his job ceased, along with severance pay and continued medical coverage, but those arrangements did not restore the work or status he had lost.

Burke interprets these changes as part of a wider shift in which computers and mergers reduce the need for middle managers, allowing companies to operate with fewer employees and increase returns to investors. In that account, Fallon’s job is both an individual position and a scarce place in a shrinking labor market. Burke’s fixation on the man who holds it converts a structural crisis into a personal contest.

A Remaining Target and Its Constraints

By the time Burke takes stock of his campaign, he has completed four killings and has three targets left, including the original set of six résumés and Fallon. He treats Fallon as the last obstacle after the remaining résumé targets, and regards reaching the end of the sequence as a route to securing employment. His language of completion and progress turns the planned attacks into stages of a project, even as the project’s consequences grow more severe.

Fallon’s work schedule shapes what Burke believes he can do. Because Fallon is employed at the mill five days a week, Burke concludes that he cannot get to him during working hours; weekends are also inconvenient because Marjorie Devore works at the New Variety and the couple maintains regular Sunday routines. Burke therefore decides that an approach would have to occur on a work night. The schedule makes Fallon’s ordinary employment a logistical barrier, while Burke’s own household commitments further restrict the times he can be away without attracting notice.

Burke first seeks information rather than acting immediately. After seeing Fallon at the luncheonette, he drives to a Getty station, fills the tank of the Voyager, and asks to consult a phone book. He locates the Slate listing and asks the attendant where County Route 92 is; she points him out of town and says it is six miles away. This modest exchange marks the beginning of a deliberate effort to establish where Fallon lives. Burke describes the visit as reconnaissance and does not expect it to settle the situation at once.

The Invented Companion

The name Ralph Upton originates in Burke’s earlier invention of a friend associated with a Money Bags idea. Once Hauck Exman has been dealt with and Burke turns his attention to Fallon, Burke recognizes that this supposed friend must continue to exist as a presence in his life. The invented relationship gives him a cover for having activities and presentations to discuss with Marjorie, and it offers a plausible reason to be doing something rather than nothing.

Burke tells Marjorie that the friend has many ideas and likes to show him presentations and bounce notions off him. The arrangement ties the false companion to the practical problem of maintaining a credible routine at home. Fallon’s name is thus displaced into a fiction Burke uses with his wife: the target is not merely on a list but supplies the material for a story intended to help Burke manage the domestic consequences of his campaign.

Narrative Role

Fallon’s significance is defined by dramatic asymmetry. Burke’s plans, calculations, and interpretations are extensively narrated, while Fallon is known chiefly through his employment, a brief sighting, and the address Burke finds. The reader encounters him as a person being reduced, in Burke’s mind, to the job he holds and the obstacle he represents. That limitation is itself important: the account provides little basis for treating the rivalry as mutual or for attributing to Fallon knowledge of Burke’s intentions.

The employment conflict also exposes the instability of Burke’s claim to the job. He sees Fallon as occupying a place that belongs to him, yet the narrative context is one of corporate contraction, technological change, and fewer available positions—not a simple contest in which a former employee can reclaim a post by defeating its current holder. Fallon’s role therefore concentrates the novel’s tension between personal grievance and structural displacement. At this point in Burke’s plan, he is the intended final obstacle, while the account gives no independent voice to the man on the other side of that description.