Close third person is when Parterniti sticks closely to one character but remains in the third person. There’s lots of character interaction so this point of view helps the reader understand who the author is talking about. Although, it does make the piece have less flow and it’s more choppy in my opinion. When the author refers to Jack by his full name Jack Hooker over and over again, this shows there audience that he has his own way of thinking about things, has strong beliefs, and the close third person shows us his inner thoughts and motivations. “America is a cow. It might sound funny if you’re not from Jack Hooker’s world.” By putting it in third person it helps you enter his world, however different his world may be. Also, how he speaks as Jack, and Bout as if he is them. 

The essay is about two competing motel owners, Jack Hooker and Donna Sinhpraseut. Although they don’t know each other, Jack makes certain judgments and is resentful while Donna is shown through the unimaginable obstacles that led her to where she is, that Jack Hooker wouldn’t know. The overarching theme could be that there’s a lot more behind someone, and there’s a lot people don’t know that’s on the inside. 

Since he switches perspectives of being Donna, being Jack, and being the reader, to show us that there are different ways to look at a situation like this one. It makes you think about what you would do in this scenario. Like how we judge people who are racially different from us without thinking about where and what they may have come from. “broken Sylvania bulbs and Budweiser beer bottles smashed from the second-floor balcony last night by some wasted Mexicans, the jagged glass reflecting on the pool bottom.” The part where it says some wasted Mexicans begins to show us racial judgement, and how this will be something that comes up again. 

It makes you think about what it really means. To me, an American is someone with the freedom, to choose where they want to live, where they want to work, who they’d like to marry, etc. Jack and Bout both bring up different ideas of what it means to be American. “An American looks like Bout Sinhpraseut. Donna. A small woman with small hands and a mouth full of magnificently white teeth.” This is the physical idea of what it means to be an American, but they also go into detail on what it’ll do if you put a sign saying American Owned on the window of your motel. It’s a deep topic that has many people looking at it differently on what exactly it means to be an American.

The theme of not necessarily knowing what is going on inside of someone, and not thinking about where they may have come from, if they’re having a bad day, directly relates to David Foster Wallace and how he said, “that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do” and the importance of noticing this. This relates to “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow” because Jack didn’t know about the obstacles Donna brought her family through and the backstory behind them.