Grostesques

Anderson's peculiarly insightful third person narrator explains grotesques by means of a grotesque who dreams of other grotesques. His style is meandering and hypotactic, explaining things in a story-telling quality. I couldn't help but to think of O'Connor the entire time I read this, not necessarily because of the similarities, but because of how his explanation of grotesques seems to work well with how things play out in her highly interpretable short stories. Some of his own tactics are similar to O'Connor's--for instance, the deliberate naming of certain characters over others is typical of O'Connor (in "Paper Pills" the old man is named Doctor Reefy and the girl remains the girl). Of course, Anderson's narrative is told with all of the vital information in the beginning, so we know of everything that will happen, and the excitement is in the details. O'Connor's stories, contrarily, have climactic and often frightening endings. His narrator seems to pass mild judgment on his characters and their situations, but very vaguely, as in the case of: "The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story." He then goes on to supply us with a curious tale of twisted apples that, in their improbable sweetness, are certainly meant to be emblematic of Doctor Reefy himself (or at least his weird knuckles).

Anderson depicts his characters as vague silhouettes with big, pop-out features, like "a white beard and a huge nose and hands," or simply "with a white mustache." Facial hair seems to be of some unknown relevance, as it is one of the few physical attributes we're offered. He has deliberately given his character limited depth in the first paragraph, only to zoom in on more specific details. Perhaps this means to bring our attentions to the sentiments, the curious moments, and the profound details that create a grotesque character, rather than the mere plot of his life.