Winesburg, Ohio

Of the books we have read so far, Winesburg, Ohio immediately takes the cake regarding social criticism.  Sherwood Anderson’s stories, filled with outrageous action and conflict, indirectly portray a number of societal flaws; flaws he obviously attempts to confront throughout the book.

 

One story that projects these flaws particularly well is “Godliness.”  Being the longest story in the book, it has plenty of room to raise social questions Anderson hoped to address – first and most obvious being religion.  Throughout “Godliness,” religion develops into a very negative force.  Jesse, who is considered a “man of god,” is driven mad with the greed he derives from his religious fantasies.  Problems trickle down from there into his daughter, Louise, and even into his grandson, David, both of whose conflicts raise different social questions.     

 

Louise, who struggles with affection her entire life, blindly allows John Hardy to take her innocence and then her hand in marriage.  The relationship between the two brings up the age-old issue of male and female miscommunication, where Louise and John enter into the relationship with very different expectations and desires.  From there, the relationship takes a dive and never recovers, strongly solidifying Louise’s hatred for men stemming from her father and ultimately ending up with her son, who she openly admits to wishing was a daughter.

 

With a family history like this, David was destined to have problems.  His interaction with his mother and grandfather thoroughly disturbs the child until he is forced to run away and never return.  His conflict obviously raises out of poor parenting, another issue touched on in the chapter.

 

While “Godliness” holds the highest concentration of societal flaws in the book, Anderson touches on many more throughout most of his stories.  This observation leads the reader to wonder if the town of Winesburg is a culmination of all the issues Anderson wishes to address, or if the town itself feeds the evil in each story.  

In Our Time

Earnest Hemingway’s In Our Time is the first book we’ve read that I can truly say seems like a collection of short stories.  While Dubliners seemed like much more of a short story collection than Country of the Pointed Firs, this latest book seems mostly like a set of individual stories.  Pointed Firs had a very chronological order with a continuous narrator, and Dubliners had a consistent setting and tone throughout.  In Our Time reads much more disjointed and choppy.  While Nick seems to be a character in a lot of stories, he is not a character in all of them.  Also, the setting changes between the stories fairly often. 

 

A consistent theme throughout book, as mentioned in the class presentation, is a failure in relationships.  In many of the stories, people either split or continue on together with dysfunctional interaction.  Early on in the stories, Nick’s mother and father seem to have a very detached relationship.  From there, the theme continues with Nick and Marge, the soldier and Luz, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, and even Joe and his father, along with others.  I relate this to the authors experience with war and the time period in which the book was written.  Obviously, war can be very wearing on relationships, and in some cases in these stories, war or violence seemed to be the cause of the dysfunction. 

 

I did have trouble with two pieces of this book in particular.  First, the journal-like chapter intros were often hard to follow and hard to relate to the rest of the stories.  Early in the book, I expected that all of intros would pertain to war, and while most of them did at least reference some sort of violence, they did not always center around the war in which the book is set.  Second, I had trouble understanding the meaning of the last two chapters, “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I” and “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II.”  They did not continue any of the themes I recognized throughout the book.  My best conclusion regarding these stories was they served as an escape from the dark tone of the earlier parts of the book – leaving behind the troubles.

 

I enjoyed In Our Time, but for different reasons than the previous short story cycles we have covered.  Where I have enjoyed the past books as a whole, I liked this book for its individual stories – some much more than others.   

Because I did a presentation on this book, I opened Dubliners with a lot more background knowledge than I usually do with the books I read.  Having read numerous reviews of the piece, I took in the words and pages with a certain predisposition regarding the tone of the book.  The tone I felt, and expected to feel, was one of loss and entrapment, and I felt it from beginning to end.

 

Though all the stories held this common theme, the first story that really jumped out at me with a dark mood was “Eveline.”  Throughout the story, Eveline’s life was described as harsh and unsatisfying.  Of course, at first her life was better, when her mother was alive and her father wasn’t drunk, but things changed and for the majority of her adolescence she was unhappy.  When she finally was presented with an opportunity to leave her flaccid life, she tried her hardest to take it.  It wasn’t until she made it to the station, moments before she would board, that Eveline realized she was trapped.  Something was pulling her back and holding her to a life in Dublin – a life of dissatisfaction.

 

“The Dead” had the same effect on me.  When Gabriel was traveling home from the party, he had such high hopes of his time alone with his wife that night.  Watching her from a distance, he reminisced all the time they had spent together, and he felt a recharge of satisfaction being her husband.  When she told him the sad story of her childhood romance, his good feelings were lost.  As the snow fell outside and all across Dublin, it blanketed them all in their sadness and dissatisfaction – the ultimate sense of entrapment.

 

If, in fact, Joyce’s intentions were to give off these vibes, he succeeded.  His look on his homeland is hopeless and it shows through in Dubliners.  The piece was a downer, there no doubt there, but it was well written and effective nonetheless.  I enjoyed this book greatly. 

In my travels this past summer, I had an opportunity to observe a new place with new people who held new views about life and the world.  Oregon, being a whole country away from my home here in Virginia, was plentiful in foreign ideas for me to learn and bring back home with me.  Considering I spent the entire summer there making friends and exploring the state, I can relate very well to the narrator in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. 

 

The narrator of these stories meets many characters in her time at Dunnet Landing making friends and listening to the stories and insight each has to offer.  During my trip this summer I met mostly people my age, but I noticed that throughout this book the narrator met only people older than her – people with more life experience than her and people with a lot from which to learn.  My observation lends itself to the idea that this story cycle is much about a person coming into her own.  As people search for themselves, their elders are an important part in shaping their views and personality.  For the narrator of this book, Mrs. Todd, Mrs. Blackett, William, and everyone else she meets serve as those dispensers of wisdom.  Through the stories they tell and the experiences she shares with them, the narrator learns a lot about the world and a lot about herself, even though she may not state it directly. Even though the people I met this summer were my own age, they had a similar effect on me – helping to shape my view of the world. 

 

A smaller point Jewett touched on in this book was that of family value in old age.  After the family reunion, Mrs. Blackett observes that the older a person gets, the more he or she values functions like the reunion they just attended.  She relates this phenomenon directly to the fact that young people see their friends and family on a regular basis while older adults do not.  I found this point interesting because of recent life situation.  As I have moved on to college and began spending my summers in far off states, I see my family less and less, and I feel a much stronger appreciation for the time I do spend with them as well as all they do for me.

 

While I did find The Country of the Pointed Firs to be a strange, and sometimes dry, story cycle, I was able to relate to it and its themes quite closely.  I think I will keep this one on my shelf for a while.