entails a search for the self. Perhaps
the central Winesburg story, tracing the basic
movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in which the
old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office close by a
window that was covered with cobwebs," writes down some
thoughts on slips of paper ("pyramids of truth," he
calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where
they "become round hard balls" soon to be discarded.
What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know;
Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old
man they are utterly precious and thereby
incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral
signature.

After a time the attentive reader will notice in these
stories a recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the
grotesques, gathering up a little courage, venture out
into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark, there
to establish some initiatory relationship with George
Willard, the young reporter who hasn't yet lived long
enough to become a grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or
with a sputtering incoherent rage, they approach him,
pleading that he listen to their stories in the hope
that perhaps they can find some sort of renewal in his
youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and fragile boy
they pour out their desires and frustrations. Dr.
Parcival hopes that George Willard "will write the book
I may never get written," and for Enoch Robinson, the
boy represents "the youthful sadness, young man's
sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at
the year's end [which may open] the lips of the old
man."

What the grotesques really need is each other, but
their estrangement is so extreme they cannot establish
direct ties--they can only hope for connection through
George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is
more than he can bear. He listens to them attentively,
he is sympathetic to their complaints, but finally he
is too absorbed in his own dreams. The grotesques turn
to him because he seems "different"--younger, more
open, not yet hardened--but it is precisely this
"difference" that keeps him from responding as warmly
as they want. It is hardly the boy's fault; it is
simply in the nature of things. For George Willard, the
grotesques form a moment in his education; for the
grotesques, their encounters with George Willard come
to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.

The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may
seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a
sparse vocabulary, un