Ex Basketball Player By John Updike Analysis

Flick’s Broken Dream “Ex-Basketball Player” is a poem by John Updike in which a former high school-athlete Flick Webb’s life has been described. Flick was a high-school basketball star but as he got older he couldn’t live his dream of becoming a basketball player, and instead became an attendant at a gas station, which was the furthest he could go with his career. This poem explains how life changes as one gets older and at times it doesn’t go exactly as we plan it, where Updike exemplifies many poetic devices of imagery, personification and metaphors. The first poetic device used in this poem is imagery. Imagery is the visual and descriptive language which is used by the poet to describe an image of someone or something for the reader. In “Ex Basketball Player” Updike uses imagery to depict a dim, grimy world of the present and compare it with the brilliant, shining magnificence of Flick’s past. Imagery is used a few times in the poem. The

This is used throughout the poem quite a few times. One of the times this is used is in the last four lines of the second stanza “Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low. One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes an E and O. And one is squat, without a head at all—more of a football type.”(lines 9-12) These four lines give the impression that a large number of people are at the place where he is working. The personification of the pumps as being human with heads, noses, eyes, and elbows underscores the ex-basketball player's failure as it suggests that only the idiot pumps now are Flick's audience. The second personification that is shown in the poem is the wrench that flick uses to do his work. The personification of the lug wrench by Flick is that it has such "fine and nervous hands, makes no difference to the lug wrench"(line 23) suggests that the lug wrench can think for itself even though we know that it can’t think for