Everything has broken apart, the tenements looked worn out by history, the empty lots were rubble, but what was most serious of all, what was clearly a sign to me of my brain damage, was how small my street looked, how chedly squeezed in aher streets. […] I was not sourning home but an absolute foreigner [….] I walked past them, stepping by in the dahing now hushed, as if the bitter air and stifling air had steeped me in silence. (Doctorow 1998:248)
His inability to regain his affinity and sense of belonging in this neighborhood, his non-identification with it as his home proves a “vulnerable hoing ” in Billy’s words. Not only the architecture, the built environo him, but also, and more importantly, the people, as part of the hu of the neighborhood, take hi turn strengthens his feeling of alienation and displacement. Here we see the predicament of Billy: on the one hand, he dislikes the built environment and thinks it too shabby and underdeveloped; on the other, he hopes strongly to be seen by the neighborhood people as an ordinary street kid as he used to be by putting on his “juggler’s rags.” Of course as capable as he is, he knows quite well that putting on the “juggler’s rags” is nothing but pretentious. Being unable to get reacquainted with the neighborhood and the munity, Billy chooses a way to escape it. He moves his apartment to a “top-floor five-room apartment with a southern exposure overlooking the beautiful trees and paths and lawns and playgrounds of Claremont Park” (322), a place far from his original neighborhood but still not far frohe novel ends with a scene of three generations of immigrants — Billy, his mother and his son, walking in the busy market of Bathgate Avenue, another sign of the Third Space, both real and imagined, in nostalgia of the past when the family used to walk there before Billy’s father fled. It is a co, still with a hope for the future as represented in Billy’s own child; it is a hybrid of the immigrant cultures, a display of a rich coes; it constitutes a specific place called Bathgate Avenue; it still alludes to the infinity of its expansion to the world history; it is a neighborhood where a Bronx boy grew up in the 1930s, and it is also the place where this boy fathers his own baby. Its hybridity and infinity, its openness and transcendence make it another example of both Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja’s Third Space.
The novel “captures well a sense of time and place, its textures, its sounds, its smells and tastes, providing a vivid aount of a boy frohe Bronx in the era of Dutch Shultz.” Parks believes this novel is more “local” than Doctorow’s other novels: “It has little reference to events outside itself, no sense of wider history — no s in Europe or local disasters. In a sense, it is the story of a neighborhood, of how two kids from the neighborhood prospered in the world” (Parks 1991:109). But to have a close look at the text, we find that Billy’s life expands far beyond his own neighborhood. As Yifu Tuan remarks, “To an intelligent and lively child, experience is active searching and oasional wild extrapolations beyond the given: he is not bound by what he sees and feels in his hoeighborhood” (Tuan 1977:31). If the Park Avenue in the Bronx is not that of wealth, the one in Manhattan is. If the Bronx home of Billy is in shabby darkness, Drew Preston’s apartment in Fifth Avenue is in luxurious light, with a bedroom “bigger than three Bronx bedrooms put together” as is viewed in Billy’s eyes when he “wandered down the hall and around soers” and finds this fact. In Billy’s training, he is dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and is told to hang around and keep his eyes open. There, he witnesses the Broadway life in the morning. “There I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the khaki-and-orange trim on his hat load up the horse manure and paper and crap and trash of a Broadway night on his wide-blade shovel and du his two wheel cart as if he was a housewife tidying up her kitchen ” (Doctorow 1998:70). The night of Broadway is turned into “horse manure and paper and crap and trash, ” which is seen as the insight of Billy the wandering boy, who believes that Manhattan is just “what the Bronx wanted to be.” His insight is also seen in his narration of the sharp contrast between James Hines’ Palace to its slummy surroundings: out of the “slummy, run-down and squalid neighborhood” with “overflowing garbage cans and Negro men standing around on the corners and pitching pennies” there is the “grand and finely kept” apartment house, “as if it was on Park Avenue”; let alone its luxurious inside. Frohe narrative, we detect Billy’s sensitivity to class distinction of the A society as well as his criticism of its social inequality revealed in the contrast of the living conditions for the poor and the rich.
Among the inhabitants, there are class distinctions, while with architectures, there are spatial differences of levels. The special experience of Billy’s journey from Manhattan back to Bronx by train enables him to stare into people’s windows and catch a glimpse of their rooms; while people inside are just leaning on their windowsills and peeping outside at the train going by. The situation is similar to that of Joe in Loon Lake who happens to see the naked Clara in front of a mirror in a passing train, which of course induces Joe to look for his white goddess. Here in this novel, the particular scene makes Billy aware of the height of New York:
It had never ourred to me before how everything in New York was stacked, one thing on top of another, even the railroads had to be put over the street, like apartments over other apartments, and there were train tracks under the streets too. Everything in New York was on levels, the whole city was rock and you could do anything with rock, build skyscrapers into it, scallop it out for subway tunnels, poke steel beams into it and run railroads in the air right through people’s apartments. (87)
In New York’s cultural landscape as perceived from the little wanderer Billy’s eyes, we see the difference between the Bronx and er being more preferable to this street boy, as an A the periphery with a strong hope to ter, as what Daniel ments on Disneyland’s escapism from darkness: “in the sa kid from the Lower East Side might have grown up with the ambition of building himself a mansion on Fifth Avenue” (Doctorow 2006:349) It is a sense of escape, of the earnestness to be t and important, of the boy’s simple hope to realize his A Dreag the height of New York, it is necessary to mention also the lowest level, that is, the underground. As Wesley Kort argues in Place and Space in , “the language of place beco in a narrative not only when it is strongly evaluated but also when the reader is transported to an unaustomed place when a familiar place is radically altered” (Kort 2004:16). The basement of the apartment houses in The Book of Daniel and World’s Fair is inhabited each with a black man to help the family household; the baseerworks is the place where the evil experiment is implemented; while the basement of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children in Billy Bathgate is inhabited by an orphan called Arnold Garbage, who likes to wander in the street to pick up trash. It is the place where Billy throws his own party like an adult. It is in this basement, where he buys his gun from Arnold. Most important of all, it is in the basets Shultz’s money he finds from the **house together with Arnold. And it is in the trash of the basement where Billy hides his portion of the money:
It was three hundred and sixty-two thousand and one hundred and twelve dollars I had taken for my portion and stashed there under carriage parts and old newspapers and broken toys and bed slats and stovepipes, and paper bags of shoes, and clothing in bales, and pots and pans and panes of glass and ylene torches and screwdrivers without handles and hammers and saws without teeth and shoeboxes of bubble-gum cards, and bottles and jars and baby bottles and cigar boxes of rubber nipples and typewriters and parts of saxophones and the bells of truorn skins of dru kazoo and broken ocarinas, and baseball bats and ships in cracked bottles and bathing caps and Boy Scout hats and badges and campaign buttons and piggy banks and bent tricycles and tions and tiny flags on toothpicks from all the nations of the world. (Doctorow 1998:318)
The postmodern collage of the different useless things in the basement, however, of the treasure. In Morris’s views, “the money is hidden in a pile of dysfunctional tools and signs, suggesting this homology: cash, like a sign, is only junk temporarily assigned arbitrary meaning” (Morris 1991:205). The truth is this sum of money is not “meaningless.” Billy uses it to rent a five-room-apartment at the top floor overlooking the beautiful Claremont Park; besides, he uses the o pay his own tuition fee. So in anding, Billy seems to suggest a spatial philosophy here: the 'ed with the most useless, the way the large sum of money coexists with the trash; and this kind of coexistence forms a special kind of urban aesthetics, an aesthetics constituted by the casual collage of things, whether useful or not. When separated, it has no hey are put together as a collage, it produces its special lude，the spatial language in a narrative can also play a dominant role，in shaping a character’s personality，influencing his or her attitude towards life，and forming a special aesthetics. We see that Billy is seldom indoors，but always outdoors，strolling in his own meditation as a street boy or as a gang apprentice to fulfill his tasks. The route of his wander and his sensitive perception of the cityscape help to construct a cultural map of the city of New York，with which he has a strong identification.