i like prologues, it is the chance where you can speculate or& stimulate your potential reader’s mind. goffman begins where the action is with a prologue:
“to be on the wire is life, the rest is waiting.” -karl wallenda

goffman as much as i understood uses ‘naive’ life sections to understand the action. beginnning with the boy’s nickel tossing play experience, he defines the ‘temporal phases’ of the play, so the action.. These are squaring off, determination, disclosure, and settlement, which he called as span of the play.

i really like his transitions from real life conditions to extreme conditions- back and forth- in a very neat way. we can see a genealogy of the gambling, analysis of the car racing, bull fighting, and so on.. the idea that the routine of life can not be named as action even there is a motion and rhytm in it makes sense at the end of the article.

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