According to Malcolm Cowley, the tales are "not incidents or episodes, they (are) moments, each complete in itself". These were labeled epiphanies by James Joyce. The term "epiphany" has survived as a critical term to designate the author's depiction of characters who "either realize or fail to realize, the inner significance of their lives" (Curry: 247).

By focusing on a central character a sense of fragmentariness is achieved. Readers can only concentrate on a single view at a time, never apprehending a global vision of the scene. This narrowness of perspective equals the narrowness of small-town America. The protagonist attempted an escape only to find another kind of constriction, a deceiving change of scenery, where images of decay surround the protagonist.

The decline of the Jeffersonian ideal is also found in the story. For example, Wing's hands can only be depicted in terms of productivity. Another myth contested is the pastoral ideal.

Noteworthy is the inclusion of the train in the story. The pastoral image of berry-picking subdued to the mechanical processes intervening. The presence of railway tracks or highways seems to announce that the landscape has been devoured by a modern state of things that does not allow further division of symbolical or cultural spaces.

The ideal homogeneity of small rural communities is defined by the grotesqueness that the town is unprepared to accept. The theme of death in life appears in all the stories and touches upon the characters' inhibited passions, whatever their origin. Each of the stories engages in a discussion of this force on the verge of the final release but ultimately repressed. Life is represented as an unending movement, lacking definite starting and ending points, and their closure suggests continuity.

David Stouck detects this Dance of Death theme in the overall structure of the work. Such dance constituted a representation of Death as it took away people's lives in a procession of dead bodies marching out of this world. In fact, the dead danced with the living in an attempt to warn them of their fate. This would account for the strange gestures that Wing makes in "Hands".

Most of the characters in the collection are returning "ghosts" apparently rescued from Anderson's childhood memories. However, death does not refer to a physical end but a spiritual closure. The grotesques try to warn their neighbors with their symbolic eccentric behavior which is tragic in itself because it proves repeatedly ineffectual.

	Created by Krystel Thaler over 3 years ago

Summary