Most of the action in
The Man with the Golden Arm takes place in Frankie and Sophie’s apartment, the Tug and Maul
Bar on the ground floor of their building, or the nearby West Division Street station house where Frankie and Sparrow regularly are hauled in on suspicion of some minor infraction. By confining events to this circle, and by repeating the same cycle of scenes again and again—card games, marital confrontations, dope injections, arrests—the novel conveys the dreary confinement of its characters’ lives. Although the musically talented Frankie boasts continually of his plans to succeed as a jazz drummer and escape his dismal situation, the reader senses from the beginning the futility of these dreams.
Too many factors militate against Frankie’s success. First is his own weakness of character; on Division Street, nobody but the devoted Sparrow "still believed their was anything tough about Frankie Machine. In addition, Frankie is a drug addict: Full of World War II shrapnel, he periodically seeks out "Nifty Louie" Fomorowski for a shot of
morphine to relieve his gut-wrenching pain.
Frankie’s pain is not, however, all physical. He is guilt-ridden over the night some years earlier when, blind drunk, he took Sophie on a wild auto ride that resulted in a collision, leaving her paralyzed. Sophie, a superb dancer before the accident, never lets him forget the consequences of his careless act, for it has provided her with something she had sought long before sustaining the injury: a means of bringing him permanently under her control.
Frankie relies on morphine, then, for the temporary illusion of freedom from a painful, guilty, fenced-in existence. Still, he fights to
overcome all suffocating circumstance, including his addiction. Time and again, trying to be a responsible husband, he swears off drugs, returns to card dealing—his only paying skill aside from occasional drumming—and, at Sophie’s request, spends hours simply wheeling her back and forth in their apartment.
Yet Sophie, afraid of ultimately losing him, continues her manipulative whining. Despite his protests of caring, she demands to know, "Whyn’t you come right out ’n say you wisht I’d got killed instead of crippled?" And Louie, confident of finally having Frankie hooked on dope, taunts him with: "You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come." It is all too much for Frankie Machine. He escapes the pain of his marriage, and attempts to overcome his addiction, through an ill-concealed affair with Molly. Then one night, blindly furious at Louie’s insults and desperately afraid of his own weakness, he kills the drug peddler with a blow to the neck.
Frankie spends the rest of his life on the run after Captain Bednar bullies Sparrow—the only witness to Louie’s killing—into implicating him. Like his life before, Frankie’s last days are hopelessly circumscribed. Molly manages to shelter him for a while, but a rival for her attentions—"Drunkie John"—informs the police, and Frankie must scurry for a new hiding place. Yet he can run only a short way between morphine fixes before the agony of withdrawal sweeps over him. In the end, the noose literally tightens as the despairing Frankie hangs himself, with "one brief strangled whimpering," in a lonely Madison Street Hotel.