Ragen’s communist beliefs

Ragen’s communist beliefs give political language to his anger at exploitation and his concern for working people, but they do not settle into a consistent or fully examined program. He condemns the profit motive, seeks out Communist organizers, and acts on their behalf by distributing leaflets. At the same time, the narrative places his convictions beside Arthur’s sharp objections and the contradiction Arthur identifies between Ragen’s professed solidarity and his criminal livelihood.

An early explanation of injustice

The beliefs become explicit when Tommy returns to the shop where he hoped his paintings might sell and finds it empty: the owner has left without a forwarding address and taken the paintings. Tommy responds by breaking the window. Ragen interprets the episode politically, blaming the capitalist system rather than treating the loss as an isolated dispute between individuals. For him, the profit motive does more than reward dishonesty; he argues that it corrupts the young, with Tommy as his immediate example.

Arthur offers a different explanation. He treats the shop owner’s conduct as personal fear and dishonesty, and questions the connection between one man’s behavior and the economic system. The disagreement establishes a recurring divide: Ragen reads harm through structures of power and profit, while Arthur insists on distinguishing an individual act from a system-wide cause. Neither interpretation is shown to resolve the incident. Instead, Tommy’s lost paintings and broken window become the concrete occasion on which their opposed political assumptions are exposed.

Ragen’s own position is not tentative. He warns Arthur, whom he identifies as a capitalist, that capitalist societies will eventually be destroyed and that power belongs to the people. The exchange presents his communism as both a theory of social change and a personal declaration of allegiance. Arthur’s bored response, which turns from their argument to the practical need for another job, leaves the political dispute unresolved and returns attention to the immediate economic consequences of the closed shop.

Leaflets and the search for a movement

A later encounter gives Ragen’s beliefs a public and organized form. After delivering marijuana to a car dealer in Indiana, he stops in Columbus for dinner and sees an elderly couple handing out Communist Party leaflets while several people heckle them. Ragen asks whether he can help and identifies himself as sympathetic to their cause. He explains his commitment by referring to the slave labor he has seen in sweatshops and factories, grounding his politics in reported experience of exploitation rather than in abstract slogans alone.

The man gives Ragen a stack of leaflets that describe Communist Party philosophy and criticize the United States for supporting dictatorships. Ragen walks along Broad Street and presses the leaflets into the hands of passers-by. This is a shift from the earlier exchange with Arthur: instead of arguing privately over the cause of an individual loss, Ragen takes part in distributing a political account of international power and economic injustice to strangers.

He keeps the final leaflet for himself. When he can no longer find the couple, he searches several blocks, hoping to learn where the group meets and join the Communist Party. His interest is therefore more than momentary agreement or assistance at a street demonstration; the passage records a deliberate wish to enter an organization. The narrative does not establish that he becomes a member.

A slogan becomes a route

Back at his car, Ragen notices a bumper sticker bearing Workers of the world, unite! He concludes that the elderly couple must have placed it there. The slogan moves his search forward: its lower corner identifies a Columbus silkscreen company, which he hopes might lead him to a local Communist group. He looks up the address, drives to the store, and watches it from his car before returning to a nearby phone booth and cutting the wires. He disables a second booth as well, then goes back to the store.

The episode joins political aspiration to the story’s abrupt changes of direction. A printed slogan gives Ragen a lead, and he pursues it with determination, but the search also brings into view the disruptive, criminal conduct surrounding his activities. The account supplies no evidence that the damaged phone lines further his political inquiry or help him find the party. They mark the boundary between his stated aim of joining a movement and the conduct through which he pursues it.

Ragen eventually follows a man from the store to a meeting in a wealthy-looking neighborhood. He is disappointed that it is not in a poor district. Introduced to the others as the Yugoslavian, he sits at the back to observe. The speakers’ abstractions and slogans fail to hold his attention; he struggles to stay awake and finally falls asleep. His expectation that the meeting would embody the struggle of the oppressed does not match the room or its proceedings as he experiences them. The scene complicates the certainty of his search without showing him abandon the cause.

Arthur’s counterargument and the central contradiction

Arthur becomes alert during the meeting and is astonished that Ragen could be persuaded by what he regards as empty political rhetoric. He objects that the Soviet Union is a dictatorship rather than a government that has transferred power to the people, and argues that capitalism has enabled freedom of conscience and opportunity. These are Arthur’s claims, not an independent judgment supplied by the narrative; their importance lies in the direct challenge they pose to Ragen’s simple opposition between capitalist oppression and popular liberation.

Arthur also points to a contradiction in Ragen’s own life. Ragen presents himself as an advocate of working people, yet Arthur sees him robbing banks and living from narcotics trafficking while imagining himself to be part of their liberation. The contrast does not erase Ragen’s expressed concern about exploitation, but it prevents that concern from functioning as uncomplicated proof of political consistency. The episode leaves the reader with both the force of his stated ideals and the gap between those ideals and the means of his livelihood.

Arthur stands, dismisses the meeting, and leaves. He then finds the car and tries, unsuccessfully, to reach someone who can come and take it. The political interruption ends in a practical consequence: Arthur has to drive himself, slowly and tensely, despite his discomfort with driving on the right-hand side of the road. Ragen’s beliefs thus recur not only as a subject of debate but as part of the changing relations between the two personalities, with Arthur’s political objection accompanying his taking control and departure.

Significance

Across these episodes, Ragen’s communism is defined by a persistent conviction that profit and concentrated power injure ordinary people, reinforced by his references to exploited workers and his attempt to join a party. Its development is shown through specific acts—defending his interpretation of Tommy’s loss, distributing leaflets, keeping one for himself, following a lead, and attending a meeting—rather than through a sustained account of political study. The narrative then places those actions beside the meeting’s disappointing reality and Arthur’s critique of both communist government and Ragen’s own conduct. The result is a belief that is sincere in its stated commitments but unsettled in its practical and moral implications.