Vonnegut’s method to a story of choice was an interesting method to learn about.  His method helped theorize something which many people think about subconsciously, but not outright about characters. He stated that characters within a story start at a certain point of wealth in the beginning of a story, and throughout the plot those characters change where they are located on that scale. So for Elmore Leonard’s “Ice Man” I will apply his method to the most important characters of Victor, Nachee and Billy Cosa, and the Ice Man.

As for Victor, he started off the story as high up on the wealth scale because he earned 4,000 on a Bull-Riding competition that he had won. Then by the end of the story had lost all of his earnings to the Ice man because he arrested him for being Apache and not white. So for the Ice Man, he went from a big bad man that was pretty high up on the scale, to becoming an even bigger bad man that was higher up on the scale because he was 4,000 richer. Meanwhile, Nachee and Billy Cosa pretty much stayed constant with the amount of wealth they each had; but they might have went down on the scale because they were arrested also.

Overall, I didn’t really like this reading because the bad guy won, the writing style was all over the place sometimes, the names got me confused sometimes, and there wasn’t enough background on the characters in my opinion. The only thing I liked was the cleverness of the title name Ice Man, with it standing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.