Shortcomings of a "Grotesque" 

While reading Winesburg Ohio, the idea of the “grotesques” was mirrored throughout every short story within the novel. The narrator defines grotesques for us in The Book of the Grotesque as follows: the “notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood” (Anderson 3). Although this gives us a sense of what makes the grotesques who they are, I noted that there were some other common elements that made the inhabitants of Winesburg, “grotesque” in essence. One of the more important aspects that I perceived to be characterizing of the grotesques was their personal inability to express their thoughts, highlighting their ineffectiveness in thought and their unsuccessful attempts at communication.

The ineffective and indecisive nature of human thought and communication is visible in Paper Pills. In this story, Doctor Reefy relieves his thoughts on “scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away” (Anderson 11). These scraps of paper represent the thoughts, and the truths that Doctor Reefy is unable to communicate to someone else. Doctor Reefy continually shoves these scraps of paper into his pockets, which he later throws onto the ground – these actions indicate an unwillingness or conflict in Reefy’s demeanor involving the acceptance of his own thoughts and his own truths. Even the peculiar way in which Reefy throws the round hard balls at the owner of the tree nursery expose his futile attempts to communicate in response to the sense of dismemberment Doctor Reefy feels from society. Also strange was the timing of the death of Doctor Reefy’s wife, consequently dying after Reefy read his the thoughts on the scraps of paper to her. This may even indicate that Reefy was unable or incapable of allowing his thoughts to exist anywhere besides these seemingly insignificant round hard balls. Through this internal conflict, Reefy portrays the human thought aspect of a “grotesque”.

A character that experiences this same shortcoming is Enoch Robinson, described as a character that “wanted to talk but didn’t know how” (Anderson 101). Similar to Doctor Reefy, Enoch has coherent and developed thoughts and ideas within his mind, but he is unable to communicate these to people, remaining quiet and awkward within a crowd of talkative people. He yearned to understand people and to have them understand him. To fill this void, he created for himself a world of his own, existing within the walls of his room in New York. These “shadow people” were invented by the child like mind of Enoch Robinson, who found no other outlet in expressing his thoughts. When a woman visits Enoch, Enoch feels that the woman is too big for the room – that her presence is driving his invented ghosts away. Simultaneously, he holds a deep desire for her to understand his own position in the room and understand himself. This internal confliction reflects the same one that haunts Doctor Reefy – a yearning to outwardly express personal thoughts countered by the inability to express or communicate such ideas.

When reading Winesburg, Ohio, many character relationships, similarities and contrasts helped expose a deeper meaning of the text, and further illuminated the overarching theme of the constitution of a “grotesque”. The comment made on human thought and communication was a strong influence on this overall message.