“Insincere, Insensitive, Selfish NYC”
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation. (Roland Barthes)
New York is a place of stark contrast, containing the best and the worst of all of us. Thomas Wolfe author of “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” and Alan Ginsberg author of his short story “Mugging” relate the experiences of New York City as a cold, impersonal, and harsh place to live.  New York has so many people packed into such a small space that sometimes the humanity of the individual is lost. In Wolfe’s short story, the narrator tells a sad tale of a lost man who meets an unhappy person. He relates his negative feelings about Brooklyn, which end up affecting the narrator’s opinion. Ginsberg’s poem also shows the inhumanity of New York City by telling his story about being mugged.
Both short stories share many similarities in their portrayal of a disturbing picture of the moral and social breakdown of New York City. They believe that New York is a place of selfishness, insincerity and insensitivity. Mr. Ginsberg describes the inhumanity of those who don’t seem to care that he had been mugged. “ O hopeless city of idiots empty eyed staring afraid, red beam top’d car at street curb arrived” (Ginsberg 929). He shows how New Yorkers have become scared fools who do not fight back and don’t seem to care about their fellow neighbor. They also state that, “We didn’t see nothing” (929). They don’t have the courage or humanity to come forward and help make their city a better place. Thomas Wolfe shows the insensitivity of city life when he shows how the narrator reacts to the pathetic man who wants to kill himself. He is only concerned with not missing his train. He says to the man, “ Well my train was comin or I’da smacked him den and dere,…all I said was, All right, mugg! I’m sorry I can’t stay to take keh of you, but I’ll be seein’ yuh sometime, I hope, out in duh cemetery” (599). Their experiences bring them both to look past all of the wonderful things the city can offer and look at the city in a negative light.   The stories also share the same point of views: two men living in New York and have personal experiences, which open their eyes to the isolation and desolation of New York City life. The descriptive languages of both stories give the reader a clear picture of the distinct emotions they felt.  
With all of these similarities come many differences in the way the stories were told. “Mugging” took place in the 70's where a man living in the city came across a story we seem to hear repeatedly in the news, feelings of a mugged victim from his own point of view. The vivid description of the event and its aftermath showed the reader exactly why it is he felt so differently about the city after his unfortunate incident. Alan Ginsberg used an original way of writing his story. He wrote it in the form of poetry, since the narrator of the story was a poet. Rather than using rhyming, a dialect or an accent, he used the relaxation chant that a Buddhist might use to console their frightened feelings. The narrator repeats over and over through the work, “ Om Ah Hum” at times of stress to prove to the reader how exactly he got through his moment of terror. He realizes though that “thinking Om Ah Hum didn’t stop em enough” (928) The powerlessness of a single individual in a city which has no inhumanity is shown in this story. Ginsberg also uses personification to describe the city as “a “bombed- out face, building rows’eyes & teeth missing”(928).
“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” uses a completely different writing structure. It is not told in poetic form but in loose structured story telling using dialect with a strong Brooklyn accent. Wolfe uses this to emphasize his change of emotions when the narrator and the other two characters speak to each other in relation to directions. For example, while the narrator is waiting for a train” I sees dis big guy standin’ deh…Well, he’s lookin’ wild.” He asks a little guy for directions who then tells him, “ Jesus! …yuh got me, chief, I neveh hoid of it. Do any of youse guys know where it is?” (598). Another guy pipes up and gives directions. The narrator doubts that he is right and calls him on it. The guy says, he lived there, “all my life, I was bawn in Wilkliamsboig” None of them seem to trust each other because they are all strangers and in this impersonal city where no one helps each other out.
Both of these stories about New York depict the city as a harsh impersonal society. They show the inhumanity of its people who don’t really care what happens to each other. They all exist in their own little worlds and don’t interact with each other in a meaningful way. Like the Cat Stevens song, “ New York Times Lyrics” says, “ Everybody bites on the Big Apple leave the hungry in tears But no one gives a damn, no one really cares how they feel they’re just paper people not real.”