McTeague (who seems to have no first name) is a bachelor, indulging in his Sunday custom of dinner at 2 p.m. in the coffee-joint frequented by the car conductors. After finishing his meal, McTeague heads to the local pub and picks up a pitcher of beer, which he then takes back to his dental office, or "Parlours," where he enjoys his drink and the music of his concertina. The music reminds him of when he worked at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County and of his mother.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours.Mac learns the trade of a dentist through books and the help of a traveling dentist who was more of a quack than anything else. When his mother dies, she leaves him enough money to set up shop on Polk Street in San Francisco where he becomes a sort of legend because of his huge size and muscular bulk--quite in contrast to the stereotypical structure of a learned man.
Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.
Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother's death; she had left him some money--not much, but enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his "Dental Parlors" on Polk Street, an "accommodation street" of small shops in the residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors.Frank Norris, the author, is a very vivid writer. Observe this passage:
Polk Street called him the "Doctor" and spoke of his enormous strength. For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy. Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora. (my bolding)Here we see one of the first mentions of animal characteristics.
McTeague's level of professionalism in his craft is repeated with his only intimate friend, Marcus Schouler, who is Old Grannis's assistant in a little dog hospital in an alley off Polk Street.
Marcus is much too talkative and greets McTeague with a barrage of words about a picnic he just returned from with his cousin Trina who hurt herself and who he seems to like....I know, right.
When he and Marcus go to pick up a dog from a "huge masionlike place, set in an enormous garden that occupied a whole third of the block." McTeague remains on the sidewalk dazed and confused by the immense luxury.
So far nothing has happened of note except the comparison of McTeague to a carnivore and his discomfort with obvious wealth. He is portrayed as what I imagine a Hufflepuff is. A big slow (before you attack me please remember how long it took Cedric to figure out the egg--with the mermaid there) but determined and unwanting of any self-glory.
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