Rapid Cuts in place, time and perspective

Hull could not take his mind off the melon. That cut piece looked so luscious and dripping that his mouth began to water; grease and mosquitoes notwithstanding. Once in a while a door opened and he could hear thin, small sounds coming from a wooden instrument, the kind of damned black melody which no white man could ever produce.

Silence. At steady intervals, the beam from the lighthouse drew its circles, passing across the dark wall, the faces in the shadow. In its embrace the pub dreamed it was swimming, far out in the darkness, like other boats in trouble out at sea. The seamen stared straight ahead. Maybe they were thinking, maybe of nothing, maybe of something special.

Look at the way everything changes from between these two paragraphs. Place, time, temperature, light becomes darkness, the sound, that “black melody” becomes the freezing silence of the white fishermen of Santa Barbara.

But there is no signal to explain why everything is suddenly different.

Hull, Johann

Without Hull there is no revolt. He is the first character mentioned in the story and the seed of, or the catalyst for the revolt.