Book Of Grotesque

Words: 565
Pages: 3

Dreams and Distress
Sherwood Anderson’s “The Book of Grotesque” and “Adventure” discusses the line between reality and dreams. “The Book of Grotesque” was used to set a certain pretext for the upcoming stories both in terms of mood and theme. The first notable aspect is to why the writer was hiring a carpenter. Anderson wrote, “The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning” (910). His want to see the outside world from within his bedroom symbolizes the isolation from reality. The second notable aspect is the “woman” metaphorically living within the writer (911). The woman symbolizes fertility and birth of a new idea. In “The Book of Grotesque” birth can be seen in two ways. The first is the
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Alice became so engulfed in believing that Ned would come back for her that she dissolved relationships with all other males and isolated herself from the changing world. He states, “…for all of her willingness to support herself [Alice] could not understand the growing modern idea of a woman's owning herself and giving and taking for her own ends in life" (913). Her blindness to the changing world ruined her ability to grow into the woman she could have been. She becomes consumed by her memories. Alice lost touch with reality when she would not accept that Ned was not coming back. She also convinced herself that “…many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg” because she was blinded by her isolation (917). Her tendency to limit her life by unmovable convictions isolates Alice from her community and distorts her features making her one of the writer’s “grotesque” characters in his dream (911). Alice had multiple opportunities to be with someone and she pushed them away because she narrowed her view to focus on a dream