by Chey

Created on: November 27, 2009

Winesburg, Ohio is a timeless place, full of people that no matter the century, will always exist, as grotesques in society will always exist. So few basic emotions and situations have changed in the development of small town America, and each passage reflects someone who is still puttering in the streets, or someone who just hopes for more than their simple life trapping them in a monotonous day to day routine.

Throughout the reading I couldn't help but compare Sherwood Anderson's narration to some of the other great modernists of his era. Specifically, two passages in the book struck me as ones that may very well have been influenced by reading Anderson had done at some point in his life. Immediately in the book, as Hands developed, I was reminded of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Though Nietzsche as well as Anderson would probably scoff at being compared to each other, their characters' philosophies seem to coincide. In Hands, Wing Biddlebaum, his spirit broken, gave George Willard advice, in hopes that he might avoid the grotesque- 'You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices'(Anderson 11). It is as if Biddlebaum has become Zarathustra himself (the character backgrounds and similarities are astonishing), and Willard has come up the mountain to visit, and hopefully attain the station of bermensch.

Throughout the book, but especially in the passage The Awakening, there were similarities to the revolutionary colliers' tale Germinal. Like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Emile Zola's writing was published well before Anderson probably even considered becoming a writer, and it was likely to have taken in part in Anderson's literary education at Wittenberg.

George Willard, temporarily morphed from a role as the bermensch, to that of the newcomer, Lantier from Germinal. The description of the part of Winesburg where the day laborers lived seemed reminiscent of Le Voreux- miserable conditions from the outside, but at the same time, conditions that the people within which survived and somewhat thrived. Willard seemed quite empathetic for a short time towards the plight of these people, not realizing as he felt sorry for them, that they were not the ones considered to be grotesques, and quite often it was actually that lack of oblivion plaguing Willard and the others that actually made the twisted personas the writer came to find beautiful. The workers in the labor

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