We started to have an interesting discussion about the motives and meaning behind Benji's destructive act at the end of the "If I Could Pay You Less, I Would" chapter. Personally, I was having difficulties pinpointing an exact motive for Benji's sabotage so I started by trying to identify the results of such an action.
Leaving the freezer doors open during the blackout would allow the hot air into the freezer causing the ice cream to melt. This would make a huge mess for someone to clean up before the shop could function properly again and would be a financial hit for Martine because he would need to buy a new shipment of ice cream. This act could be interpreted as retaliation against the Head Patting Incident, however, Martine has no way of knowing that Benji was the culprit and thus falls flat as a revenge scheme.
Still lacking motive, I moved on to the image Ben creates about how younger Benji thought of the results of his actions. For one, he shows how a small act out leads to graver consequences over time which can be applied to a bigger picture. The open doors lead to the ice cream slowly melting and the cartons crashing to the ground. This could also be a metaphor where Benji's act is an act outside the expectation (stereotype, maybe?) Martine has for him (Benji talks about how trusting Martine is) and the ice cream in the freezer is society's biases that have to be cared for to be maintained. Thus, when Benji acts outside the norm, he tears down the biases imposed on him by society.
In a similar direction, the image portrays Benji in a way, a hard outer shell that keeps two opposites from mixing. His world is about fitting into categories, you have to act black or white. In this scene, he mixes the cold and hot air, which are not supposed to mix. The opposite forces create a hybrid that destroys the ice cream. Keeping the neatly organized freezer as a symbol for socially constructed bias and working on the principle the the hot and cold air represent black and white culture, the implication is that when the two mix, they tear down stereotypes.
However, the result as the carefully separated flavors of ice cream (racial stereotypes) mix is not pretty and uplifting. The final image seems like a perversion of the multiracial mosaic of faces hypothesized by the promoters of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of a beautiful picture of togetherness and equality, the mixture turns into a massive, useless puddle. Now, I can think of two possible meanings. 1) The nasty puddle is the destruction of stereotypes induced by people affirming their position outside of the norm or 2) it is an omen of cultural homogeneity that comes from "colorblindness". Neither of which provide an inkling as to the motive.
So why does Benji let all the ice cream melt? He just wants to act out. He wants to affect some sort of change and study the reaction. He's just a kid testing boundaries. Young Benji might see some symbolism but not much. Ben, however, clearly presents the metaphor in the child's actions.
This is a really interesting way of trying to parse the differences between Ben the narrator and Benji the character. It sure doesn't seem like Benji is trying to work any particular symbolism or metaphor here. I recognize his seemingly inexplicable action all too easily as the kind of unthinking destructiveness that (sometimes) comes all too naturally to (some) adolescent boys. I did a bunch of things as a kid that I really couldn't begin to explain--just following weird impulses. But maybe they could be mined for deeper, symbolic or metaphorical meanings now. To find these meanings in Benji's act works in the context of a novel, because we read novels looking for these other levels of meaning. It had nothing to do with whether he "means" any of this at the time. (This is all connected to the issues of memory and perception in the novel--the "present"/older perception isn't necessarily "more correct." It's just *different*.)
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