Plot
A homeless man, Nate Bledsoe, snatches a pair of nifty shoes from the target of a mob hit dumped in an alley (the initial item of clothing was to be a hat, but it was felt that shoes would be better symbolically, "as they take you places"). Wearing the shoes infuses him with the personality and memories of the victim; he continues his life as the dead man. Nate stops by the home of the victim's girlfriend, who recognizes his manner and kiss. Nate then goes to a bar to confront Dagget, the boss who had him killed. Dagget is at first unsettled, but then realizes who Nate is and guns him down. Before he dies, the spirit promises to return until he finishes Dagget off, vowing "I'll be back Bernie, and I'll keep coming back ... again and again". The body (with shoes) is dumped in the same place the original victim was dumped, and another bum finds the corpse and steals the shoes, after putting them on a smile coming over his face....
Read more about this topic: Dead Man's Shoes (The Twilight Zone)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)