We Can Get Them For You Wholesale Summary

For most of the time, a man’s behavior and characteristics can be easily influenced by his environment and others who surround him. While people are greedy, they can become evil persons under the undesirable impact from the others. In the story We Can Get Them For You Wholesale, Kemble, a salesman from a illegeal company, manipulates Peter who is the protanganist of this story by offering him a lower price again and again, causing him to make an irrevocable mistake in the end. Through the usage of rhetorical devices such as allusion, diction, and symbolism, as well as the details on character’s expression, Neil Gaiman, the author of this short story, gives reader a message about the terriable outcome of greedy heart by depicting how the protagonist …show more content…
However, his actual personality is not completely terrible. As what the author tells at the beginning of the story, Peter “liked people and people liked him” (1). He was an easy-going man. He drank just because he wanted to be sociable. When he thought about the third person he wanted to kill, his physics teacher “who had delighted in making his life a misery” (5) crossed his mind. It was ridiculous that he couldn’t even remember the teacher’s name and he was not sure if the teacher was still alive. If he really hated someone and wanted him to disappear, his name wouldn’t be so easily forgotten. Readers can infer that the person he wrote was just someone who was insignificant to him. Evidently, Peter didn’t feel hatred toward him. He “scrathed his head” to name the person he wants to kill, which shows that he struggled to find out another person. He didn’t want anyone else to be assasinated but he can’t help taking the advantage from the special offer. Besides, he spent a whole night to fill out 10 names on the list, which shows that it was a very tough a job for him to decide the people he wanted to kill, because he actually liked people. The author demonstrates how Peter went against his will to kill people and applies irony to tell that even though he liked people, he is the one who kill everyone in the world. This contract shows how greed can change an …show more content…
When he was offered the “bulk rate” which was the assassination of 10 people after he filled two individuals on the list of assassination, he “sat sucking his pen, hunting for wrongs done to him and people the world would be better off without” (5). Apprently, the verbs “sucking” and “hunting” are not formally used by the author; however, in this way, he helps reader to understand Peter’s staus and behavior easily. In other words, he vividly applies diction to signify Peter’s change from an moderate human to a “beast”. When Peter just found out the pub where he met with Kemble, the author marks the pub sign “showed a donkey and was indeed remarkably dirty”(2). The pub gave Peter a terrible feeling at the beginning. However, after he met with Kemble a few times, he thought that the sign looked more like “a pale horse” (7), rather than “a dirty donkey”. A dirty donkey always leaves people a terrible impression, while a pale horse symbolizes brilliance. Peter’s feeling to the sign tells reader that he is much different to before after he negotiated with Kemble. Through the description of Peter’s feeling on the bar sign, the author conveys that it always happens to some people that sometimes they are blinded by their greedy hearts and become a totally different ones. If they don’t realize that they have lost themselves, they would go further and further away from the path they are