Fleas

Throughout the Mezzanine, it seems that most of the events of the lunch hour, the objects Howie sees along his way, and Howie's recollections from childhood aren’t spectacular or meaningful on their own until Howie’s enthusiasm and digressions make them seem so. For example, the narrator walks to buy a cookie, notices that urinals look like gargoyles, and remembers that his dad used to hang ties on doorknobs, none of which seem like irreplaceable ideas or events in the book; You could imagine that Baker would have had no trouble writing a book of 10 or 100 times the length of the Mezzanine—he wouldn’t run out of interesting things to notice or comment on. On a surface level, the choice of the escalator as the vehicle of the Mezzanine also seems like an arbitrary and insignificant choice by Baker. But after closer inspection, it appears that the escalator is intended as a metaphor, suggesting that Howie is not only rising to his office but also a different mental state with a ...