Final thoughts

Since we are finishing up Winesburg, Ohio, I’ll just make this post about my final thoughts of Winesburg. Well to begin with I really did enjoy this book, well actually the book is a tad bit confusing but the discussions we have had based off the book helped me better understand the book, look at it in a different way but then at the same time I questioned more. It made me wonder how Anderson really intended for this book to be read. Did he want people to read it as if it were a collection of short stories that just seemed to be intertwined? Or as a novel and each of the short stories were just really flashbacks and a description of the people who were once young and innocent and then in a moment of their innocence, something came and disrupted them, causing them to become grotesques? Anderson allowed you to build a connection with these characters’ you weren’t angry at them, you pitied them. As I learned about Doctor Reefy, Elizabeth, Wing Biddlebaum, Tandy, Enoch, and Doctor Parcival, my heart opened up a little more because of their loneliness. With these people who are considered grotesques I think more about the people that I see every day. We all start off innocent, as a baby we are filled with excitement and amusement for the world and at the same time filled with youth and innocence.  But how many times do we see people that walk past us that may be dressed a little different, look a little different, act a little bit more dramatized, walk a little funny, or seem a little bit more out there? And what do we do? We judge them. We get an idea in our heads and that’s it, there is no stop to think that they might have some kind of story, one that would make us feel sorry for them and want to comfort them rather than poking fun at the things that we see is wrong in them. Winesburg, Ohio makes me consider how many of us are really grotesque; it’s as if Anderson has created this guide for us to ultimately recognize that in a way we are all grotesque and that we are no better than the woman on the street who tries to dress like her daughter. The structure of the work had me reconsidering what it means for a text to be a novel vs. a short story; here the lines blur a bit, and I was a little unsure. But concluded that it is a slight combination of both in that , each short story is a chapter that is part of the “The Book of the Grotesque”, but that also each of the “chapters” could stand alone and tell their own story. I related it to the structure of the bible and how it is one story that is the Bible but within in the overall collection of the bible there are little stories inside it , that make up chapters that can stand alone.