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KMID : 0615219840090010183
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Journal of Kwangju Health
1984 Volume.9 No. 1 p.183 ~ p.201
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Sherwood Anderson´s Isolation Study
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조권수
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Abstract
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Human isolation has been. one of the most common, if not the most predominant, themes of literature, especially of the novel. Since isolation the human being everywhere, it may well be that the novel should deal with the subject so often.
It seems, however, that no literature has been upon human life than American literature.
Anderson writes about ordinary people doing ordinary things, yet they are not normal or commonplace in the usual sense, because his concern in this book is not so much the physical appearance of their external world as the psychological reality of their internal world.
In quest of the meaning of life, a person takes one of hundreds of thoughts to himself, believes it to be his truth, and tries to live his life by the truth, which becomes his ide?e fixe. He tries to express it and seeks understanding of others. But his efforts fall, because he is so obsessed with his own idee fixe and others are with their own that he is unable to communicate with them and they overlook his hidden reality beneath appearance. The inability to communicate leads him to frustration and isolation. He withraws from society or rejects it, and then confines himself within the wall of his dream world which he himself erects. By doing so, however, he more often than not falls into the depths of isolation, because his frustration simply intensifies the need for understanding and love.
Anderson deals with three aspects of the problem of human isolation in his three stories. The first story, "Hands" deals with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, "Paper Pills" is devoted to the inability to communicate thought; and the third, "Mother" focuses on the inability to communicate love.
This three-phased examination of the basic problem of human isolation sets the one for the rest of the book because these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in human nature.
In these three stories Anderson sets forth the theme of the problem of human isolation in the three aspects that recur in most of the other stories. These three aspects, the inability to communicate one´s feeling, one´s thought, and one´s love, are at the heart of the problem, and in the following stories he shows these short-comings at work in other situations with other central characters but essentially as restatements of the same theme. In each of the characters something deep within him demands expression.
Anderson avoids giving any definite answer or solution to the problem of human isolation, because he seems to know that the solution of human isolation is easy to say, but at the same time it is hardly possible to realize, because the completion of human life are not so easily manipulated by a few words. So he only suggests some tentative conclusion by way of the development of some characters. And Anderson´s tentative conclusion, however, is best embodied in the development of George Willard. George is, in many ways, the central character of the book, his role being one of. the basic unifying factors of the separate stories.
We can see that Anderson´s tentative answer to the problem of human isolation, as well suggested by way of George Willard´s awakening, may be summarized as this: man can break up the wall ´which separates him from other people and regain the tradition of cultural manners only through compassion and empathic understanding which is intuitive rather than rational; it is understanding and love that make life worth, living, although they cannot ultimately defeat human isolation.
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