The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

In the novella “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,” Bukowski deals with the concept of materialism and how it can affect people in real life. However, what he really admits through the voice of the narrator is that he was also one of the mere slaves of materialism. The narrator uses foreshadowing to imply that he would eventually be the factor that kills Cass, “the most beautiful woman in town.”

In order to understand how the narrator killed Cass, knowing the background of Cass is important. She was basically a victim of the materialistic society. Cass was physically attractive, very much. She was grown up in an environment where her dad was an alcoholic and her sisters were always jealous of her beauty. With her relatively long experience with men, she was hurt because of those who considered her as an object, a sex machine, and nothing more than that. For them, who she really was did not matter; all they cared was how sex-appealing she was. As a denial of the objectification by the men around her, she preferred ugly men. She thought ugly people had more personality than physically attractive men. The narrator was “chosen” for this reason. While Cass was going out with the narrator, she frequently tried to destroy her beauty, as a test to confirm whether he still liked her without the beauty. She relied on the man for him seeming to be different, at least in her thought.

However, the narrator, as he implicitly confesses from the beginning, was attracted to Cass for her body. The first impression he stated after being “chosen” by Cass was that he felt some “pride” and that “she was not only the most beautiful woman in town but also one of the most beautiful” he had ever seen. He kept praising her beauty while he said beauty was “not the only factor” that affected him. When he saw Cass injuring herself, he “felt disgust and horror,” not sympathy. He did not want her to hurt herself because it was ruining her body, not because it was destroying herself. Although he tried to act as if he were a different man than others since he “thought” he could see the personal side of Cass, he never truly devoted himself to understand Cass and her denial of the society. He kept stopping her from “acting out,” but neglected curing the fundamental problems. His actions and statements showing his compatibility with other men implicitly foreshadow the consequences happening later in the story.

As the story continues, the narrator more explicitly confesses that he could be the one killing Cass. The line where it says “Perhaps some man, something, would ruin her forever. I hope that it wouldn’t be me,” reveals that he already knew that Cass was fragile enough to be ruined by men. Even though he knew that he was the only one whom Cass was relying on, the narrator disregarded her implied request for protection. When she pierced two pins under her eyes and scarred her neck with a bottle, all he did was to tell her to stop destroying her “beauty.” Most essentially, he did not have enough will to save her forever; he “drove her to the bar, bought her a drink, and walked out,” when she said she did not want to stay in his shack. Then he “found a job as a parker in a factory the next day and the rest of the week went to working.” Though he knew she could definitely be ruined without his protection, he neglected her need and left. The author foreshadows that these actions were direct causes to Cass’ suicide.

Despite his attempt to refuse “materialism” and to look at Cass, “the most beautiful woman in town”, with both outer and inner beauty, the narrator failed to do so, and therefore remained the same as “other men.” By foreshadowing in numerous lines, from descriptions to statements, Bukowski confesses through the character of narrator that he was the one who eventually killed Cass.