This scene starts out with what should be closely related to a Haymarket Square scene.  In S.O.T., following a throwing of a bomb “police revolvers fir[ed] haphazardly into the chaos” killing many people, and in the Haymarket Square Riot an extremely similar scene occurred.  In both events we also have a set of scapegoats for the event, and it all erupts from a labor dispute.  This solidifies a lot of earlier thoughts about Straka’s distaste for big businesses.  He mentions labor disputes in other books, and throughout this novel, and for him to do this implies he either had personal problems with this topic, or perhpas he was attempting to make a broader statement about how the world should function.

Following this the writing stems off into some sort of digression to another subject.  Jen and Eric seem to think it is a story of how Vaclav Straka died, or allegedly died.  In order for the author to know this story, it would be necessary that Vaclav is indeed V.M.S. or that V.M.S. knew Vaclav well.  Either way, according to this, Vaclav most likely did not die from jumping off the bridge.

However, even more should be pulled from Vaclav’s story.  In the story Vaclav is taken away from the entire event, and it becomes “just two, boy and girl, their newly-adult figures long and lean, as if their bodies each have been stretching themselves toward futures of limitless promise” (106).  In order for Vaclav to be stretching towards an amazing future, he most likely would not have been contemplating suicide at the same time, so this solidifies my earlier statement.  On top of this I think we can also find some hints that Vaclav was not Straka.  If he was, writing this and paying tribute to this boy’s death, as Eric and Jen guess, he would not have written a empathetic piece about himself.

The next few pages will greatly elaborate on this story, thus you should take a very close look at them as you continue to read.