My Financial Career
STEPHEN LEACOCK
MUHAMMAD SHAHEER – ENGLISH – GOVERNMENT COLLEGE, KASARAGOD
Stephen Leacock’s humorous essay’ My Financial Career’
illustrates a Youngman’s nervousness and fear regarding opening a bank account.
In this lesson the author satirizes the attitude of banking system that tries
to embarrass the common man who visits banks for monetary transactions.
When the narrator visits a bank to open an account
everything in the bank rattles him. When he enters the bank the sight of clerks
and wickets creates terror in him .excess of anxiety in him makes him a butt of
ridicule in front of the staffs in the bank.
His inexperience and mysterious manner prompt the manger to
consider him as a detective agent from Pinkerton’s group, the manager mistakes him
as millionaire, but man’s fifty six dollar makes the manager uninterested and
he informs the accountant to help him to open an account. In his nervousness he
enters in to an iron safe mistaking it for the door. The manager orders him to
come out, this mistake aggregates his tension. With difficulty he deposits his
fifty six dollars but at once he decides to withdraw six dollars for present
use but his tension forces him to write fifty six instead of six. This strange
act surprises the accountant .
In order to conceal his foolish mistake he pretends that
somebody has insulted his anxiety on banking; so he decides to withdraw all his
money he has deposited. He gets back the money and rushes out of the bank. Everyone in the bank laughs at
him
In this short humorous narrative Stephen Leacock wants tells
about the inhospitable attitude of bureaucracy towards common people who visit
bank like offices to get things done. Leacock’s deft portrayal of the
characteristics of officers in the bank is an attack on the power structures
which terrifies laymen unnecessarily. Sentences which Leacock used to denote
the mocking countenance of both the manager and the accountant towards the
narrator’s helplessness and lack of knowledge on banking affairs is a can be deemed it as a sharp criticism against
the haughtiness and arrogance of official systems.
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