Talk:The Stoker

Novels Mid‑importance

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The last sentence barely makes sense.

Speaking as a naif the article summarises the story as so: There's this stoker about to get fired, Karl defends him, in the process of defending him Karl runs into his Senator Uncle, they depart the boat, Karl looks at the stoker through the window with sympathy then wonders "if, to him, his uncle could ever replace him".

I'm sorry, what!? I just kept reading it over and eventually figured it was Karl wondering if his Senator Uncle could do something like replace the German stoker with a Romanian out of ethnic prejudice. This seems about to be the only reasonable way to interpret it, now I'm just marveling at how poor a job it does in this regard. Like, especially that totally unambiguous "to him" that does nothing to help the reader. 49.199.101.80 (talk) 17:35, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]