What Does the Brick Wall Signify?

I find that George's raging alcoholic life and the bricks from the bar are parallels to each other. Both of these themes are broken objects of the past and symbolize the detrimental need to revert to the past. In George's case, he is chronic gambler who feels compelled to spend all his money in order to feel how he once felt before his life came crashing down. When George gambles, he feels as though he has restored his previous life to where "loss was again possible" (72). D'Ambrosio writes that men like George believe that loss of money signifies that you have something to lose, and therefore, brings them back to the past where they had valuable possessions like spouses, houses, and health to lose. In the case of the brick wall of the bar, towards the end, the narrator explains that like the brick wall from the bar resembles the same downfall George experienced. Moreover, he says that like George, the narrator gambled the bar like George did because "our kind of gambling, the wish of it, was an attempt to salvage the past...we trying to amend history" (72). Similar to George, the narrator attempts to the maintain the bar through keep it a relic of the past, much like how George gambles to maintain "losing" as a relic of the past. D'Ambrosio even continues with a more specific parallel that connects both George and the brick wall through the coinciding events leading to their downfalls. In the end, George dies from someone attacking him with a pipe and in the previous paragraph before that, D'Ambrosio describes how bricks inevitably break down with men chipping away at them. In both cases of George and the brick wall of the bar, holding onto the past fails and they both end up tragically beaten away.In the end, I feel that D'Ambrosio uses these two parallels to show the reader the tragedies of staying tucked away in the past. Even though people do wish to revert back to the past, we ultimately should move on and progress because change is always happening. C