Word: sullenness
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...soon they are fleeing Mussolini's police across the countryside of northern Italy. While hiding is a railroad depot they are captured, and the fascist official leaves the pair in a workshed under the guard of two railroad workers while he fetches more help. To Marlow, the workers look sullen and threatening, but Zaleshoff begins loftily addressing the older one as "comrade" and humming obnoxiously. Suddenly he lashes out to knock down the younger worker, while the older guard just stands there and lets them escape. Marlow is confused until Zaleshoff later explains that he had noticed a tiny scar...
Travis tries desperately to make some sort of contact with the world, but he is systematically rebuffed. The macadam mob--taxi-dispatchers, hookers, pornographic movie-house vendors--looks at him with sullen, suspicious eyes. The claustrophobic routinization of their lives, the daily bombardment of the senses, has forced them into the defensive position of "cool". They are wary, detached from their experience; some adopt swaggering, arrogant personae, others merely become dead to the world--all of them are irreversibly divorced from their emotions...
...careerists and the party of fairness." We all know the careerists. The fairists are that group of students who favor lotteries as a means of admitting students to freshman seminars and oppose master's choice. The force which motivates the party, says Aldrich, is a "passive, dull, and slightly sullen drive to do away with 'distinctiveness.'" In case you are still wondering just who Aldrich is referring to, he tells you how to spot them: "The most obvious emblem of the party is a uniform seen practically everywhere at Harvard--construction boots, jeans, plain flannel shirts, and puffy quilted parkas...
Aldrich's misunderstanding of the social and political climate at Harvard serves his ends. He wants us to imagine that sullen cadres are manning the ramparts in defense of fairness, for it supports his belief in the broader, more nefarious movement that threatens to turn Harvard into just another indistinguishable subdivision of the real world, a collegiate Levittown. To regain the "character" it has already lost, he believes the University will have to dedicate itself to "intuition over fairness, to judgment over test scores, and it must discriminate before it facilitates...
...sullen twelve-year-old girl hunches over in a chair, surrounded by her father, mother, sister, brother and a child psychiatrist. Her problem: severe asthma that will not respond to medical attention. After listening to the parents discuss the asthma, the psychiatrist suddenly switches attention to the sister's ample figure. She is clearly overweight. Isn't that a family problem too? As the family starts talking about obesity, the asthmatic girl sits up in her chair...