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SUICIDE IN THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY
by
MARGARET WATKINS, B.S. in Ed.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved
Accepted
December, 1970
T3
1970
No, 191
CLop. ^2^
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to thank Dr. Warren Walker
for his untiring aid in the preparation
of this thesis.
11
fi-.>
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
ii
CHAPTER
I.
II.
III.
IV.
INTRODUCTION
I
CAUSES OF SUICIDE
8
EFFECTS OF THE SUICIDES ON SURVIVORS
THE AUTHORS' PURPOSES IN USING THE
SUICIDE THEME
BIBLIOGRAPHY
. .
67
78
101
111
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Each year between 18,000 and 20,000 persons in the
United States carry out the irrevocable and awful decision
to end their own lives.
people try and fail.
Approximately six times that many
These figures are extremely con-
servative because of social pressures against certification
of death as suicidal.
Statistics for attempted suicides
are even more conservative, because often these cases are
not reported at all.
Clearly, however, suicide is a major
health problem in our country and is among the first ten
causes of death in the United States.
Norman Farberow and Edwin Shneiciman, in their
thorough study of suicide, point out that society assumes
various attitudes toward suicide, "ranging from complete
condemnation through mild disapproval to acceptance and
2
incorporation as one of the mores of communal life."
In
the Japanese culture, harikiri was held in high esteem for
centuries; the kamikaze pilots of World War II were national heroes.
Ancient Greeks and Romans often sought
suicide as an honorable end to dishonor of some sort or
Norman L. Farberow and Edwin S. Shneiciman, eds..
The Cry for Help (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 4.
^Ibid., p. 3.
fl
even as a noble sacrifice.
In contrast to this view of
suicide, the Catholic Church considers it a mortal sin and
3
British law considers suicide a crime.
In our own coun-
try, the attitude toward self-destruction is usually one
of condemnation.
Actually, most people view suicide with
a strange mixture of revulsion and fascination.
These
mixed feelings have produced almost a taboo on a serious
discussion of suicide.
As Dr. Karl Menninger points out
in the foreword to Clues to Suicide, although suicide is
responsible for an alarming number of deaths, there has
never been a widespread campaign against it as there has
4
been against less preventable deaths.
Indeed, only re-
cently, largely through the efforts of Farberow and Shneidman and their colleagues, have any real advances in suicide prevention been made.
Even in our modern society,
there is a stigma attached to suicide which makes it repugnant to the average person.
Even so, the paradoxical aspect of self-destruction, that man uses his power and intelligence to destroy
that same power and intelligence, has fascinated some of
our greatest writers.
Albert Camus, in his philosophical
work, "The Myth of Sisyphus," calls suicide the "one truly
Farberovj Cry for Help, p. 237.
E. S. Shneidman and N. L. Farberow, eds.. Clues
to Suicide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. v.
philosophical problem."
In the preface to this work, Camus
states his purpose as "an attempt to resolve the problem
of suicide."
Camus, an existentialist, taking as his
starting point that the world of reality is "absurd," discusses suicide as a serious answer to the problem.
He op-
poses suicide, however, and offers his own answer to the
absurdity, namely, that a man can find "freedom" in scorning the world even while he lives in it.
At least one American writer would have disagreed
strenuously with Camus' argument.
Ambrose Bierce, in his
essay "Taking Oneself Off," emphatically defended man's
right to take, his own life.
Suicide to Bierce indicates
not cowardice, but great courage.
He suggests that so-
ciety's condemnation of suicide stems from this knowledge
when he says, "The notion that we have not the right to
take our own lives comes of our consciousness that we have
6
not the courage."
He concludes that suicide would occur
more frequently if people were not so cowardly as "to live
7
on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue."
Amonc
those justified in removing themselves, he includes those
5
Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus," The Myth
of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans, by Justin O'Brien
(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 3, v.
Ambrose Bierce, "Taking Oneself Off," The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Neale Publishinc
Company, 1912), p. 339.
7
Bierce, "Taking Oneself Off," p. 340.
I
!J
suffering incurable disease, those who are heavy burdens
to their friends, those threatened with insanity, those
addicted to drunkenness or any destructive habit, those
without friends, property, employment, or hope, and those
who have disgraced themselves.
Bierce is not alone among American writers concerned with and often sympathetic to suicide.
In the field
of the short story, suicide has concerned writers since the
beginning of that genre in America.
The purpose of this
study is to find American short stories involving suicide,
to seek the causes and effects of the suicides revealed
in the stories, and to try to ascertain the authors' purposes in portraying the suicides.
selection of stories were two:
The criteria for the
(1) " that they include an
actual or potential suicide, and (2)
that they be of suf-
ficient literary merit to be interpreted in scholarly books
or journals.
An initial list of stories was suggested by
the thesis director. Dr. Warren S. Walker, but the list
grew as a result of reading and research.
The final canon
of works includes the following thirty-two stories:
Anderson, Sherwood
Bierce, Ambrose
Gather, Willa
Crane, Stephen
Dreiser, Theodore
'Unused"
'George Thurston"
•Killed at Resaca"
'The Mockingbird"
'One Officer, One Man"
'One of the Missing"
'The Story of Conscience"
'A Tough Tussle"
•Paul's Case"
'Maggie"
'The Lost Phoebe'^
I
Dreiser, Theodore
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Garland, Hamlin
Harte, Bret
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hemingway, Ernest
Melville, Herman
O'Connor, Flannery
O. Henry
Parker, Dorothy
Poe, Edgar Allan
Porter, Katherine Anne
Salinger, J. D.
Warren, Robert Penn
Welty, Eudora
Wharton, Edith
Typhoon"
May Day"
Daddy Deering"
The Outcasts of Poker
Flat"
Ethan Brand"
Indian Camp"
Bartleby the Scrivener"
The Lame Shall Enter
First"
The River"
The Furnished Room"
Big Blonde"
The Assignation"
William Wilson"
Flowering Judas"
Noon Wine"
Old Mortality"
A Perfect Day for
Bananafish"
The Patented Gate and
the Mean Hamburger"
Clytie"
The Burning"
Ethan Frome"
These short stories in general involved no major
textual problems, with the exception of Stephen Crane's
"Maggie."
The Crane text edited by Thomas A. Gullason was
used, a text which is based on the 1896 American edition
and includes an appendix showing the variant readings from
the 1893 "Maggie."
For all the other stories, the most
accessible short story collections or anthologies were
used.
Its appearance in Walker's Twentieth-Century Short
8
Story Explication determined whether a story had reflected sufficient literary merit to be interpreted by
o
Warren S. Walker, Twentieth-Century Short Story
Explication, Second Edition (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String
Press, 1967), passim.
J
an authoritative source.
Four short stories were dis-
carded because no interpretations were listed for them.
These stories included "The Success Story" by James Farrell,
"The Murder on Jefferson Street" by Dorothy Canfield Fisher,
"Old Demon" by Pearl Buck, and "A Summer Tragedy" by Arna
Bontemps.
All available explications for the other stories
were read and are listed in the bibliography.
My apprecia-
tion is due the Inter-Library Loan Service for making
available several explications not in the Texas Tech
Library.
With all respect to the "New Criticism," it would
seem obvious that in this particular area of study, some
historical context would be helpful.
Accordingly, after
an intensive reading of the story itself to determine the
cause of suicide, its effect on others, and the author's
presumed purpose in dealing with this theme, there is then
an attempt made to set the story in an historical context,
to view the story as a part of a particular literary period
or movement and as a part of a particular author's work.
Even so, all three of these aspects cannot always be determined for all stories.
Although a cause for the suicide
can usually be ascribed and the burden of the blame assigned, in many cases the effect of the suicide can only
be inferred, either because of lack of evidence within the
story or simply because the suicide serves as the termination of the story.
Attempting to ascertain any author's
^
real purpose is at best a speculative venture, but for this
study the attempt is essential.
For each story, therefore,
an earnest effort is made to determine what the author was
trying to show by his use of suicide, to seek whatever commentary on life and society the author was illustrating
by man's destruction of his own identity.
I
CHAPTER II
CAUSES OF SUICIDE
There are various reasons for the suicides of fictional characters in the American short stories which this
work examines.
These causes could be classified in several
different ways, but for the purposes of this study, they
are grouped along lines developed by psychology.
Why do people commit suicide?
Before the era of
modern science, explanations sometimes derived from demonology, the belief in a supernatural being who entered the
body and soul ,of the victim, driving him inevitably to
1
suicide.
More recently, many psychiatrists have assumed
that anyone committing suicide is at least temporarily insane.
The latest studies in this field reveal, however,
that all the dynamics present in self-destructive persons
are also present to some degree in normal persons.
Im-
portant dynamics to consider in studying suicide cases are
as follows:
depression, especially when coupled with anx-
iety; tension and agitation; hostility and guilt; and dependency needs, particularly if these needs have been
2
frustrated or threatened.
^Arthur L. Kobler and Ezra Stotland, The End of
Hope (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), p. 2.
•'Norman D. Tabachink and Norman L. Farberow, "The
Assessment of the Self-Destructive Potentiality," The Cry
for Help, p. 66.
8
1
Freud attempted to refute the belief that an "illness" drove a person to suicide when he developed his concept of the conflict within each person of a death instinct
3
and a life instinct.
More recently Jungian psychologist
Bruno Klopfer has explained this concept by showing each
ego or self as having both a bright and dark side.
When
the dark side predominates, a situation in which death
seems more desirable or less horrifying than life occurs.
This state> he believes, is a necessary prerequisite for
any suicidal act.
Klopfer examines the following as those
situations in which death seems preferable to life.
1. The death of a hero or martyr, in which
situation the life of the individual seems
far less important than the preservation of
an ideal.
2.
Intractable pain or unbearable mental anguish makes life seem so miserable that
death appears largely as a liberation, regardless of what expectation a person may
have regarding the hereafter.
3.
Counterphobic reaction to death is closely
related to the situation described above,
in which the expectation of death seems so
unbearable that the individual prefers an
end to horror to a horror without end.
4.
Reunion with a dead loved one is sought
in cases where the death of a loved one
seems to carry with it all the meaning of
life. The desire to reunite with this
person in death becomes so overwhelming
that it does not even matter whether the
individual has any concrete notion of how
this reunion will take place.
Bruno Klopfer, "Suicide:
View," The Cry for Help, p. 194.
The Jungian Point of
y
10
5.
The search for freedom, one of the most pe- ^
culiar of these situations, leads to cases
of completely unpredictable, almost whimsical acts of suicide, involving the desire
not to be committed, not to be tied down, to
life or anything it contains.
6.
The search for closure, the opposite situation, is an older person's longing for death
as a well-deserved closure to a rich and
full life.
7.
This situation is another aspect of death
from the Jungian point of view, namely,
longing for spiritual rebirth. This situation
rarely comes to the conscious awareness of a
person with suicidal tendencies.
As the editors of The End of Hope point out in the
foreword of that book, it is impossible to understand any
individual, or his behavior, without knowing the setting,
the significant aspects of his environment.
Since man is
continually in relationship with others around him, these
others exert much influence upon him and his outlook on
life.
Suicidal acts are often communications with meaning
5
for the significant other persons involved.
Thus, in
this study, in trying to determine the cause of each character's suicide, an effort was made not only to look within
that character for potential dynamics of suicide, but also
to observe carefully that character's environment, the
other characters close to him and their effect on him, and
the situation which made death seem the desirable end.
Klopfer, pp. 196-197.
^Tabachink and Farberow, p. 68.
11
Klopfer's situations listed above are used as a framework
for this chapter.
These situations will be referred to
by the numerical order given by Klopfer.
Situation 1
Illustrating Situation Number 1 described by Klopfer is Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who dies a hero's death
in "Killed at Resaca," a Civil War story by Ambrose Bierce.
Bierce describes Brayle in glowing terms as having a
"gentleman's manners, a scholar's head, and a lion's
heart."
Always in the foremost ranks in battle, he would
often "stand like a rock in the open when officers and men
7
alike had taken cover."
Of course such foolhardy courage could not endure.
At Resaca, Georgia, his death came, as it was bound to
come, since, as Bierce explains, "he who ignores the law
of probabilities challenges an adversary that is seldom
beaten."
During the heat of battle, Brayle, ignoring di-
rections of a safer way, rushes into the open to deliver a
message to the other flank of the army, "a picture to see
. . . erect in the saddle . . . his handsome profile . . .
intensely dramatic" but "equally doomed by friend and
(1
Ambrose Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," The Collected
Works of Ambrose Bierce, II (New York: Neale Publishing
Company, 1912), p. 94.
7
Ibid., p. 95.
12
8
foe."
Brayle is quickly shot from his horse.
A letter found on Brayle's body reveals the cause
of his intrepid courage.
His sweetheart had written him
that someone had reported seeing him crouch behind a tree.
Determined to establish his bravery to his loved one,
Brayle succeeds, but heroic death is still, irrevocably,
death.
In Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," the
character of Mother Shipton also falls into the situation
ascribed as the martyr's death.
Mother Shipton starves
by denying herself the allotted food rations so that the
"innocent" Pin.ey can survive longer.
In a sudden and
hardly credible switch of character, after being thrown
out of Poker Flat because of her low moral character.
Mother Shipton becomes so impressed by the innocent love
of Piney and her fiance'', whom the outcasts encounter in
their journey to the next tovm and with whom they are snowbound, that she is willing to sacrifice her own life to
prolong theirs.
Bret Harte asks the reader to believe this
nobility is the sole motivation for her suicide, and, as
usual, this sort of sentimentalism asks a great deal of
the reader.
In this same story, the central character of John
Oakhurst also takes his own life in a suicide with
^Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," pp. 98, 99, 100
t)
13
ambivalent motivation.
His suicide, although it is an
escape from an impossible situation, also has heroic aspects.
Even though Oakhurst assumes leadership of the in-
congruous band of stranded outcasts and innocents, overseeing the food rations and fashioning snowshoes as a
possible means of obtaining aid, he realizes the futility
of their plight in the snowstorm.
His occupation has pre-
pared him for "the percentage in favor of the dealer/' and
Q
"He was too much of a gambler not to accept Fate."
When
Tom Simpson is to make a journey to seek help, Oakhurst
leaves with him, supposedly to accompany him only to the
canyon and return to camp.
When the rescuers from Poker
Flat finally arrive, however, they find John Oakhurst at
the head of the gulch, dead by the derringer by his side.
Of course Oakhurst only precipitated a fate he knew to be
inevitable, but a certain heroism is evident in his heaping a large supply of firewood for the women before he
killed himself, a death which would mean one fewer mouth to
consume the scant supply of food.
Perhaps this mixed mo-
tive was partly what Harte meant when he called Oakhurst
". . . a t once the strongest and yet the weakest of the
outcasts of Poker Flat."
9
Bret Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat, •' The
Greatest American Short Stories, ed. by A. Grave Day (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 94.
-^^Ibid., p. 104.
\J
14
Situation 2
This situation, in which the character finds himself in such unbearable mental anguish that death appears
as a liberation from a life which has become miserable,
accounts for the great majority of suicides in this study.
Other psychologists have elaborated on this particular
situation.
^ -,
Farber, in his study of suicide, suggests that
.
.
loss of hope IS the lethal element in suicide.
II
. ,
This loss
of hope usually comes when a precipitating cause makes life
more difficult to cope with and closes off any possibility
of improvement.
Farber contends that the final act of sui-
cide is basically "a resolution, a movement, perceived as
the only possible one, out of a life situation felt to be
12
unbearable by one . . . with hope extinguished."
As
Kobler and Stotland have observed, suicidal attempts are
really frantic pleas for help and hope from other people.
13
In these stories, the characters' cries for help have gone
unheeded.
Hemingway's "Indian Camp" offers the most clearcut instance of such a cause.
In this story there is de-
picted a young Indian husband who commits suicide while
Maurice L. Farber, Theory of Suicide (New York
Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), p. 2.
12
Farber, Theory of Suicide, p. 42.
•'•^Kobler and Stotland, The End of Hope, p. 8.
15
watching a crude Caesarean operation on his wife.
The
young Indian, confined to a bunk in the Indian hovel because of a badly cut foot, has watched his wife suffer
through two days of childbirth agony.
When Nick's father
arrives, he performs the Caesarean surgery without anesthetic or proper equipment, surgery which nonetheless
saves the mother and child.
The husband, however, perhaps
feeling guilt for his wife's suffering and utterly helpless to relieve her pain, finds the situation more than he
can bear.
In his desperation and despair, he slashes his
throat silently, liberating himself from the horror.
As
Nick's father explains to Nick laten "He couldn't stand
14
things, I guess.
Guilt, coupled with an unbearable sense of disgrace, accounts for Captain Hartroy's suicide in Ambrose
Bierce's short story "The Story of a Conscience."
In a
story twisted by irony and coincidence, Hartroy is responsible for the execution of an enemy spy who had fomierly
saved him from disgrace and possible death.
While a young
private, Hartroy had been responsible for guarding this
same Confederate spy, Dramer Brune, and had fallen asleep
on duty.
Brune compassionately did not escape and woke
Hartroy just before his relief guard came, thus saving his
Ernest Hemingway, •'Indian Camp, •' The Short
Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1927), p. 95.
16
reputation and possibly his life.
Now Hartroy has cap-
tured Brune a second time and, despite his grief-stricken
conscience, orders his execution.
As Brune is before the
firing squad, Hartroy fires a bullet into his own brain
and thus "renounced the life which in conscience he could
15
no longer keep."
The protagonist of "The Mockingbird," another story
by Bierce, is also a victim of Situation Number 2 as it
takes the form of remorse and grief.
Private Graylock, on
guard duty in the Union Army, becomes confused as to his
whereabouts and loses his bearings.
In his imagination or
in actuality, .he sees a figure in the darkness and fires
a shot which arouses the entire camp.
A skirmish ensues.
Only because he does not know which way to go, Graylock
remains at his post and is subsequently praised for his
"bravery."
The next day, sensitive to the fact that he may
have precipitated a battle for no reason, he searches for
his victim of the previous night.
He finds that he has
shot his twin brother, a Confederate soldier.
Overcome by
grief and guilt for his actions, Graylock takes his ov/n
life.
In "Paul's Case,^^ a short story by Willa Gather,
the protagonist chooses suicide when the harsh reality of
•^^Bierce, "The Story of a Conscience,'• The Collected
Works, II, p. 177.
17
a life he hates closes in on him.
Paul, a sensitive young
man living in industrial Pittsburgh, finds his environment
intolerable and lives in a world of lies and fantasy.
Each
time he returns to his neighborhood, he has "the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and common16
ness."
His fantastic lies about himself and his open
defiance of school authorities lead to dismissal and
trouble with his father.
Denied by his father his only
consolations in life, the theater and concert hall, Paul
steals money from his new employer in an attempt to move
into the glittering world of wealth and beauty he so much
acimires.
Since he cannot overcome the drabness of his
world, he decides to defy its conventions.
He runs away
to New York and lives a life of opulent luxury for a few
days, quickly spending the stolen three thousand dollars.
"Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of
17
boy he had always wanted to be."
When Paul reads of his crime in the Pittsburgh papers and learns that his father is coming to New York to
take him back to Pittsburgh, Paul realizes what is ahead
of him:
-'-^Willa Gather, "Paul's Case," Willa Gather's Collected Short Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1965), p. 248.
Gather, "Paul's Case," p. 255.
18
The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young
People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the
damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him
with a sickening vividness.-'-^
His money almost gone and his world of ugliness once again
closing in on him, Paul takes a cab to Newark and throws
himself in front of an onrushing train, thus dropping "back
into the immense design of things."
Like the hothouse
flowers he loved so well, Paul had "one splendid breath"
19
in "brave mockery at the winter outside the glass."
Another character for whom the world of wealth is
desirable but unattainable is Gordon Sterrett of "May Day,"
by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Gordon is the protagonist of one
of the three plots intertwined in this long story in which
Fitzgerald attempts to show the confusion of values and
general hysteria immediately following World War I, the be20
ginning of the Jazz Age.
Sterrett, a victim of Situation
Number 2, takes his own life when existence for him has become meaningless and empty.
Much of Sterrett's deterioration has taken place
before the story begins.
A would-be artist, he has de-
serted his art to drift into meaningless employment.
Now,
broke, depressed, and in trouble with a lower class girl,
he contacts a former classmate for a loan to save himself.
l^Cather, "Paul's Case," p. 259.
^^Ibid., p. 261.
2^James E. Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art
and His Technique (New York: New York University Press,
1964), p. 54.
19
Briefly, he reenters the world of affluence and glamour
by going to a Harvard alumni dance.
A former girl friend,
Edith, recoils at the change that has taken place in Gordon
He wasn't at all light and gay and careless—a
great lethargy and discouragement had come over
him. Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint,
surprising boredom.
In a display of self-pity, Gordon confesses to Edith,
"Things have been snapping inside me for four months like
little hooks on a dress . . . I ' m very gradually going
loony."
His contact once again with the world he has known
and lost, the world of money and material success, seems
to push Gordon farther down the path of total deterioration,
Denied the money he seeks, in the course of the evening he
gets drunk and sometime later that night he marries the
mistress who represents everything in himself and in life
that he despises.
Awakening from his drunken stupor the
next morning, he senses the thought flash across his brain
that he is "irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson."
This
realization snaps those remaining "hooks" of his already
unstable emotional state, and "leaning across the table
that held his drawing materials, he fired a cartridge into
21
his head just behind the temple."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "May Day," Babylon Revisited
and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1960), pp. 48, 74.
20
In 0. Henry's sentimental "The Furnished Room,"
the author uses a double suicide to complete his usual
formula story with a surprise ending.
A young man, name-
less, has searched a city fruitlessly for five months for
some trace of his girl friend who had left their home town
to try her fortune in show business.
Coming to a run-down
boarding house in the slums of the city, he inquires about
the girl once again.
The frowzy landlady denies any knowl-
edge of the girl but rents him a room.
The boy, sitting
in the grimy disordered room, is suddenly assailed by the
odor of mignonette, his sweetheart's favorite fragrance,
so strong it seems an actual presence in the room.
"Oh,
God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a
voice to call?"
Desperately he searches the room for some
trace of his love, '•but of her whom he sought, and who may
have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there,
he found no trace. •' Supposedly overcome by despair from
the false hope the scent of mignonette had aroused, he experiences a dramatic •'ebbing of his hope," so desperate
that he ••turned the gas full on again and laid himself
22
gratefully upon the bed.^'
The surprise ending comes in a dialogue between
the landlady and her cronies.
By a far-fetched coincidence.
22
0. Henry, •'The Furnished Room, " American Short
Stories of the Nineteenth Century (London:
J. M. Dent
and Sons, 1930), pp. 370, 371.
21
the young girl had committed suicide in that same room the
week before, the very girl for whom the boy had been so
frantically searching.
The mercenary landlady had with-
held this information in order to rent the room.
Brooks
and Warren have pointed out the extreme sentimentality of
the story and the lack of convincing motivation for the
. .
23
suicide which occurs.
Supposedly, the boy takes his life
in desperation after the mignonette odor raises false
hopes, but as Brooks and Warren show, this incident could
more logically'have enlivened his hopes that his search
was closer to its end.
Due to such lack of logic and co-
herence, O. Henry has created a tale •'straining to stir
24
the emotions of the reader"
and straining seriously the
reader's ability to suspend his disbelief.
Possibly no other story in this study has aroused
as many contradictory views concerning the cause of a suicide
as has J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish. •'
This short story concerns Seymour Glass, married six years,
on a trip to Florida supposedly in an effort to recover
from a depressed mental state.
A telephone conversation
between Muriel, his wife, and her mother during the first
part of the story reveals their gross superficiality and
^^Cleanth Brooks and Robert P. Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959),
p. 96.
24
Ibid., 98.
22
lack of true concern for Seymour as a sensitive human being.
The second scene introduces Seymour on the beach,
engaging in fantasy with a small girl named Sybil.
In
their conversation Seymour tells her of the "bananafish"
which go into a hole, glut themselves on bananas, and die
because they are too bloated with bananas to escape from
the hole.
Returning to his hotel room, Seymour becomes
paranoically indignant
in the elevator because he thinks
a strange woman is staring at his feet.
Entering his own
room, while his wife Muriel sleeps on one twin bed, Seymour shoots himself on the other.
Critics discussing this story usually do so in the
context of the entire body of Salinger's work, claiming to
find some of the clues to Seymour's suicide in other
stories.
Although they disagree, a consensus would ascribe
Situation Number 2 as the cause of Seymour's death.
James
E. Bryan admits that whether Seymour's suicide can "represent abject defeat or a limited victory cannot be deter25
mined."
Warren French claims Seymour commits suicide
"not while depressed but when extraordinarily exhilarated
from surmounting the necessity for compromise."
In an-
other essay Bryan insists that Seymour "kills himself in
oc.
James E. Bryan, "Salinger's Seymour's Suicide,"
College English, XXIV (1963), p. 229.
26
Warren French, "Salinger's Seymour: Another
Autopsy," College English, XXIV (1963), p. 563.
23
27
a depression of guilt feelings. •'
Finkelstein believes
28
Seymour found "the world of normalcy" intolerable.
Wiegand, using another Salinger story for his assertion,
sees Seymour as "surfeited with the joy of life^' and committing suicide because of his own mystical spiritual ill29
ness.
Paul Levine, pointing out the juxtaposition of
Seymour's rapport with the child Sybil and his total inability to communicate with adults, concludes that Seymour's
"tragic obsession with his own inability to communicate
with the outside world and live with it on its own terms
30
IS what kills him."
Gv/ynn and Blotner claim Seymour is
"destroyed by -his ov/n hypersensitivity, pathetically
31
heightened by lack of love."
These last two observations seem most clearly evident in the story itself.
Seymour's mystical experiences
and spiritual insights are nowhere mentioned in this story.
Muriel and her mother reveal themselves as extremely superficial, materialistic people, not genuinely concerned with
^^Bryan, "Reply," College English, XXIV (1963),
p. 564.
Sidney Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation
in American Literature (New York: International Publishers,
1965), p. 227.
2%illiam Wiegand, "J. D. Salinger^s Seventy-Eight
Bananafish," Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed.
by Henry A. Grunwald (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 127.
-^Opaul Levine, '•J. D. Salinger: The Development of
the Misfit Hero,^' J. D. Salinger and the Critics, ed. by
William F. Belcher and James W. Lee (Belmont: Wadsworth,
1962), p. 94.
^^Frederick L. Swynn and Joseph L. Blotner, The
Fiction of J. D. Salinger (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958), p. 19.
9A
Ama
the person of Seymour at all.
A.
No indication of true af-
fection for him appears anywhere in their conversation.
They discuss Seymour as if he were an object rather than
a human being.
Their chatter about styles and social posi-
tion is interspersed with comments on Seymour.
Clearly,
he is no more important to them than the current styles in
Miami Beach or the types of characters Muriel has met in
the bar.
When Seymour is introduced, at least a part of his
dilemma is clear.
He is an imaginative, sensitive indi-
vidual, kind and gentle to the little girl Sybil.
Certainly
the Muriel already depicted would in no way understand him
or give him the kind of love and understanding he requires.
The story of the bananafish offers varied interpretations,
as many critics have shown.
In the context of this story
alone, however, they seem to symbolize Seymour's recogni>
tion of his own destruction in an insensitive world concerned only with materialism.
As he tells Sybil, '•They
32
die . . . they get banana fever.
It's a terrible disease. ••
Seymour too has a terrible disease, inability to cope with
a crass materialistic world totally indifferent to sensitivity.
Seymour is able to escape this indifference only
when he "aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his
33
right temple. '•
^^J. D. Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananaf ish, ••
Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), p. 23.
^^Ibid., p. 26.
25
Perhaps the most pathetic victim of suicide in
this category appears in "Clytie" by Eudora Welty.
Clytie,
a pitifully lonely little spinster, is the only sympathetic
member of a decadent Southern aristocratic family.
Her
father is paralyzed by a stroke, a brother has already committed suicide, a paranoid sister rules the household
with screams and curses, and the remaining brother is an
alcoholic.
In this setting of grotesque Gothic horror,
Clytie has been isolated all her life from normal human
relationships because of a false family pride, since •'The
Farrs were too good to associate with other people."
Clytie's life has been a search for love and an attempt to
discover the mystery of human identity, which she has associated with the wonder and complexity of human faces.
She goes through the streets of the small town, peering
into the faces of people, since to Clytie
The most profound, the most moving sight in the
whole world must be a face. Was it possible to
comprehend the eyes and the mouths of other
people, which concealed she knew not what, and
secretly asked for still another unknown thing?
In her past somewhere Clytie remembers a laughing, happy
face and •'that vision of a face . . . almost familiar, al34
most accessible"
dominates her search. The faces in her
dreary and diseased household, however, are always thrusting
34
Eudora Welty, ••Clytie, " A Curtain of Green and
Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), pp. 159,
163.
26
themselves between her and her vision.
This vision and
Clytie's search are actually an attempt on her part to
recover her own original, laughing self or childhood.
Clytie's moment of truth begins when the barber,
motivated purely by greed and convinced that the entire
family is raving mad, comes to shave her father.
Poor
weird Clytie, in her loneliness and desperation, touches
the "pitiful, greedy, small face" of the barber "with
breathtaking gentleness^' and is appalled at the ••horrible
moist scratch of the invisible beard, the dense, popping
green eyes—what had she got hold of with her handi"
Her
domineering sister screams at Clytie to run out to the
rain barrel to fetch shaving water for her father.
In the
reflection of the old rain barrel, Clytie meets ••the face
she had been looking foi;^^ but •'Everything about the face
frightened and shocked her with its signs of waiting, of
35
suffering."
Seeing her own ugly, distorted face in the
surface of the water completes Clytie's moment of truth.
She realizes in this moment that her search for love is
futile and that her life has been perverted and warped into
a thing of horror.
As Ruth Vande Kieft so aptly puts it,
"In that one instant she recognizes the contrast between
the vision of the laughing child of the past and the mirror
image of the ugly and maddened adult of the present."
•^^Welty, "Clytie," pp. 176, 177.
3^Ruth M. Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (New York
Twayne, 1962), p. 83.
27
Clytie, in the horror of her discovery, "did the only
37
thing she could think of to do,"
and plunges her head
into the depths of the rain barrel, drovming.
Release from
her suffering comes in the only way possible for Clytie.
In Eudora Welty's only story about the Civil War,
"The Burning," she depicts two Southern aristocratic spinsters. Miss Myra and Miss Theo, in the horror and destruction of war.
Two of Sherman's soldiers ride horseback into
the ancestral mansion, rape Miss Myra, and burn the home.
The two ladies with a slave girl wander through the ashes
of the city of Jackson.
In their wanderings, they come
upon a hammock in a neighboring yard.
Using the hammock
ropes. Miss Theo assists a willing Miss Myra in hanging
and then hangs herself.
The motive for these suicides appears to be twofold.
The ladies do indeed represent the epitome of Southern
aristocracy and antebellum society, which is being destroyed
by the Civil War.
Their horror and helplessness in this
destruction is apparent in the story.
Miss Vande Kieft
calls the suicides of Miss Theo and Miss Myra "dramatic em38
bodiments of a tragic inability to cope with reality."
However, their suicides also seem ritualistic to a degree,
a protest against the brutality they have endured.
"^"^Welty, "Clytie, •• p. 178.
38
Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty, p. 141
Miss
28
Theo, retaining her dignity to the end and displaying incredible strength, indicates that the hangings are to be
an object lesson to the Union troops when she says, "And
that's the way they'll find us.
39
them for what they've done.^'
The sight will be good for
Dorothy Parker, in •'Big Blonde," shows another victim of Situation Number 2, even though the suicide attempt
is unsuccessful.
In her twenties, the protagonist. Hazel
Morse, a model for a wholesale dress firm in New York,
"took it for granted that the liking of many men was a de40
sirable thing/'
and all her efforts are bent on maintain-
ing her popularity and being a good sport, so in demand
with the only men she knows.
When she marries, however.
Hazel reveals another side—she is domestic, truly in love
with Herbie, and tired of being a ••good sport."
She lapses
into blowziness and her natural sentimental nature of weeping easily.
Herbie soon tires of this Hazel who is no
longer such a good sport.
They quarrel frequently. Hazel
takes more and more refuge in liquor, and Herbie finally
leaves her.
From there. Hazel drifts into a life filled
with a succession of lovers, all demanding from Hazel an
increasingly difficult gaiety.
She relies on liquor to buoy
oq
Eudora Welty, "The Burning,'• The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955),
p. 142.
^'^Dorothy Parker, "Big Blonde," A Pocket Book of
Short Stories, ed. by M. Edmund Speare (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), p. 26.
29
her spirits, which, however, become steadily more depressed.
Somewhere in her progressive state of depression,
her thoughts become concerned with suicide.
"The thought
of death came and stayed with her and lent her a drowsy
sort of cheer.
dead."
It would be nice, nice and restful, to be
From thinking about suicide. Hazel progresses to
reading avidly all suicide accounts in the newspapers and
feeling a •'cozy solidarity with the big company of the
voluntary dead."
As alcohol becomes less and less effec-
tive in restoring her spirits, she finds herself often
"sav/n by the sorrow and bewilderment and nuisance of all
living" and contemplates suicide frequently but finds every
method repulsive except poison, which she does not know
how to obtain.
This difficulty is overcome when a friend
recommends a sleeping aid, veronal, but warns against an
overdose.
Hazel's breaking point comes when she sees in
the street "a big, scarred horse pulling a rickety express
41
wagon crash to his knees before her"
agely beating the worn-out animal.
with the owner savHazel unconsciously
identifies with the work horse and its meaningless existence.
That night she methodically empties the bottles of
veronal, joking to herself that she's so tired she's "nearly
dead."
"^•^Parker, "Big Blonde," pp. 40, 42.
30
But there is no such easy escape for Hazel.
Found
unconscious by her maid, she is brought back to the life
she dreaded so much.
When she first regains consciousness.
Hazel "saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering
beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things."
As she
faces her continued dreary existence. Hazel "prayed without addressing God, without knowing God.
Oh, please,
please, let her be able to get drunk, please keep her al42
ways drunk."
Although •'Big Blonde" bears traces of naturalism—
Hazel is trapped by her environment—Theodore Dreiser's
"Typhoon" and Stephen Crane's •'Maggie" present suicide in
more recognizably naturalistic terms.
The principal char-
acter of Dreiser's story, Ida Zobel, is reared in a strict
German immigrant household.
Ida, a beautiful girl denied
normal boy-girl relationships, is abnormally attracted by
the world of romance and is easy prey for the young man
she is finally allowed to see.
VThen Ida becomes pregnant,
the young man refuses marriage.
Ida, caught by the fear
of her father and social pressures, faces her lover with a
revolver to force him to make her a ••respectable" woman.
When he again refuses, in emotional hysteria, Ida kills him,
She is taken into custody for the term of her pregnancy,
tried for her crime, and acquitted.
The acquittal does not
"^^Parker, "Big Blonde," p. 48.
31
secure Ida a place in conventional society, however, nor
does it restore her father's prestige in the community.
Considering herself a social outcast and unable to face a
future in a society which condemns her, Ida finally returns
to the site of her seduction and calmly steps into the
water of King Lake,
. . . wading out to her knees—her waist—her
breast—in the mild caressing water—and then to
her lips and over them—and finally, deliberately—
conclusively—sinking beneath its surface without
• I- 4*^
a cry or a sigh.^-^
Another example of a story in the naturalistic tradition is Stephen Crane's "Maggie," a portrayal of a girl
of the slums driven to her destruction by the forces of
her environment, both the people around her and the circumstances under which she is forced to live.
Maggie, living
in the Bowery slum and subjected to beatings and inhumane
treatment by a drunken mother at home, seems at first
strangely untouched by the animalism and brutality surrounding her.
••The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.
She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a
44
tenement district, a pretty girl.^'
But Maggie aspires to a better life.
When Pete,
a flashy Bowery bartender, comes to visit her brother Jimmie, poor Maggie endows him with all sorts of qualities he
^^Theodore Dreiser, "Typhoon," Chains; Lesser Novels
and Stories (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 217.
44stephen Crane, '•Maggie, •• The Complete Novels of
Stephen Crane, ed. by Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 115.
D^
does not possess.
Maggie perceived that here was the ideal man. Her
dim thoughts were often searching for far away
lands where the little hills sing together in the
morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens
there had always walked a lover.
Maggie's idealized view of Pete causes her to consider herself much his inferior and to yearn for the •'romantic••
life she thinks he represents.
When he takes her out, she
is overwhelmed by the '•splendor" of the theaters and beer
halls, so in contrast to her squalid home, strewn with the
wreckage of innumerable drunken brawls.
Wistfully, Maggie
. . . wondered if the culture and refinement she
had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the
heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a
girl who lived in^-a tenement house and worked in
a shirt factory.
Maggie is seduced by Pete after a particularly violent brawl waged by her mother and brother, a brawl in
which her mother hurls drunken curses at Maggie and screams
at her:
" . . . yehs have gone t' d' devil.
curse yeh, an' a good riddance.
as youse in me housel"
Git out.
Go wid him,
I won't have such
The news of her seduction, however,
is received with righteous indignation by both her mother
and Jimmie, although both are responsible for her dov/nfall.
The mother, in her own mind, suddenly becomes a
mother who has reared her child with love and understanding and is thus repaid:
" . . . she could not conceive how
45
Crane, "Maggie,'• pp. 117, 125.
33
it was possible for her daughter to fall as low as to
bring disgrace upon her family.'•
Jimmie, although he has
fathered two illegitimate children himself, is suddenly
the irate brother, angered at the plight of his fallen
sister and damning her "that he might appear on a higher
46
social plane. ••
Maggie, denied her home, becomes increasingly dependent on Pete, who tires of her quickly and eagerly resumes an affair with a former girl friend when she appears
at his bar.
Maggie, destitute, returns home, only to be
jeered at and cursed by all the residents of the tenement,
especially her mother and her brother.
When Maggie ap-
proaches Pete in his saloon, he scorns her and is indignant
that she should appear at his place of business.
Maggie,
wandering the streets aimlessly, with nowhere to go and
with no one to whom she can turn, accosts a priest, hoping
for some help in her situation.
But the priest, "made a
convulsive movement and saved his respectability with a
vigorous side step.
He did not risk it to save a soul."
Thus, Maggie is a victim of her total environment:
the
slums of the Bowery; brutal, savage relatives; an irresponsible lover; and a disinterested man of religion.
Several months later, Maggie, reduced now to a
streetwalker, is plying her trade unsuccessfully on a
^^crane, "Maggie," pp. 128, 138, 139.
"^"^Ibid., p. 147.
47
34
particularly dark and wet evening.
Finally, "She went into
the blackness of the final block^' to the "deathly black hue
48
of the river••
and there Maggie drowns herself, escaping
a life of hopelessness and despair, so different from the
romantic world she had yearned for.
Far from the naturalistic school is Edgar Allan
Poe's '•The Assignation," a bit of sheer melodrama complete
with Byronic hero, beautiful dark-haired maiden, "Satyrlike" husband, and a double suicide for love.
In Venice,
the narrator witnesses the rescue of a child who falls into
the canal from an upper window of the Ducal Palace.
The
hero of the tale, of "Herculean strength . . . mouth and
chin of a deity—singular, wild, full liquid eyes . . .
49
profusion of curling, black hair,"
appears out of the
darkness, dives into the canal, retrieves the child, and
delivers him to the arms of his mother, the beautiful
Marchesa Aphrodite, whose reaction is singularly odd.
The
narrator realizes by her reaction that the two know each
other and overhears a whispered arrangement of a meeting
"one hour after sunrise."
Offering the dark hero a ride
in his gondola, the narrator agrees to call on the strange
man at davm the next morning.
Arriving at his opulent and
exotically luxurious apartment, the narrator is overwhelmed
48
Crane, "Maggie," p. 149.
49
York:
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Assignation," Tales (New
Dodd, Mead, 1952), p. 185.
35
by the magnificent splendor of the quarters.
After the
dark hero reveals a beautiful full-length portrait of the
Marchesa, he quaffs a cup of wine and reclines on an ottoman.
At that moment, a page from the Marchesa's household
bursts in to announce that the Marchesa Aphrodite is dead
by poison.
When the narrator turns to see the reaction of
the dark hero, he is amazed to see that "his limbs were
rigid—his lips were livid—his lately beaming eyes were
50
riveted m death." The "entire and terrible truth"
flashes over the narrator as he realizes that the assignation the beautiful lovers have made is with death.
In a stranger but not so exotic story, "William
Wilson," Poe warns the reader in an epigraph that his story
concerns the "spectre" of "conscience grim."
The first
person narrator, describing himself as an "outcast of all
outcasts most abandoned" and explaining his family of
51
"imaginative and easily excitable temperament"
which he
has fully inherited, tells of his life from early school
days to his fatal meeting in Rome with his strange double.
V/hen Wilson is quite young at a school in England,
he first encounters "the other William Wilson," strangely
like himself.
Intensely disliking this strange person of
whom no one else seems aware, Wilson, even early, is struck
50
Poe, '•The Assignation," pp. 193, 194.
CI
Poe, "William Wilson," Tales, p. 1.
36
by the fact that the other Wilson brings "to mind dim
visions of . . . earliest infancy—wilci, confused, and
thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet
unborn."
Fleeing this school, he sees less of his counter-
part through the years but, at times of extreme degradation
and debauchery, the other Wilson will appear, whispering
his name like a spectre, even though to escape him, Wilson
fled in vain "to the very ends of the earth."
The double
follows to Eton and to Oxford, where Wilson realizes this
strange twin is striving only to "frustrate those schemes,
or to disturb those actions, which if fully carried out,
52
might have resulted in bitter mischief."
But Wilson wants no interference in his headlong
pursuit of debauchery and degradation of character, and
when in Rome at a ball, as Wilson is preparing to seduce
another man's wife, his "spectre" appears, Wilson determines to destroy him.
Their encounter takes place in a
small anteroom adjoining the ballroom, where Wilson plunges
his sword "with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and
through his bosom. •' When Wilson turns to secure the door,
however, a huge mirror suddenly appears at the end of the
room, and horrified, Wilson sees his ••own image, but with
53
features all pale and dabbled m blood^'
and his double
^^Poe, "William Wilson," pp. 11, 21.
^^Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
/
37
whispering " . . . henceforward art thou also dead. . . .
In me didst thou exist . . . see by this image, which is
thine ov/n, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.'•
54
In
the destruction of his conscience, for surely that is what
the other mysterious Wilson is, William Wilson has also
destroyed himself.
Patrick Quinn calls "William Wilson" a "first person account of a man's struggle with, evasions of, and
final disastrous victory over, his own conscience, the
55
specter in his path."
Indeed, there is no evidence that
a second William Wilson exists except for the word of the
narrator.
Davidson, in his book about Poe, calls Wilson
"a clever man of the world, who, however, in order to succeed in the world, must destroy an essential part of him. .
56
self, his soul or spirit."
The story does reveal Wilson's
gradual descent into degradation. ^ To make the descent complete, he must destroy his conscience, but in the process
he himself is destroyed, and only then does Wilson fully
realize that he and his double are the same.
Diametrically opposed to the melodramatic romanticism of Poe is Robert Penn Warren's realistic and understated story "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger,"
^"^Ibid., p. 24.
^^Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), p. 221
56
Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 198.
38
which portrays both the victory and the defeat of the protagonist, Jeff York.
York differs from the farmers around
him, weathered, gaunt, with "leather-coarse skin," only by
his modest prosperity.
By years of backbreaking labor and
extreme thrift, York owns his dirt farm in contrast to the
tenant farmers who are his neighbors.
The symbol of Jeff's
final victory over the grim land is the patented gate, an
elaborate mechanical contraption, which York installs at
the entrance to his farm.
This gate, a decided luxury,
represents to York his triumph over being poor and rootless.
York's wife, however, does not respect this battle York
has waged with the land.
Success to her is exemplified by
the hamburger diner, where York treats his family on their
weekly trip to town.
When the diner is put up for sale,
York, forced by his wife to sell his hard-won farm land
and buy the diner, stoically paints the diner and helps his
wife get settled.
Then, his spirit dead already and every-
thing he has worked for gone, Jeff York walks to the country and hangs himself from the patented gate of which he
was so proud.
In Melville's strange story, "Bartleby the Scrivener," the protagonist withdraws from society to the extent that he finally starves himself to death, thus becoming another victim of Situation Number 2.
Bartleby, em-
ployed by the narrator, a Wall Street lawyer, is a strange
creature from the beginning of the story.
The lav/yer first
39
notices his extreme eccentricity when he asks Bartleby to
proofread some legal documents and is met with the response, "I prefer not to."
Bartleby gradually recedes
into himself, participating less and less in the office
work until finally he "prefers not to" do any more copying
at all, the only work he has engaged in.
He simply sits
and stares endlessly through the window at a totally blank
wall facing the office.
In exasperation at Bartleby's re-
fusal to work and his refusal to leave the offices, the
lavTyer eventually moves his business.
Bartleby is sub-
sequently evicted by the new landlords and placed in the
Tombs, a prison, on the charge of vagrancy.
There, Bartleby
withdraws even more, refusing to eat until he meets the
death he seems to seek.
Melville, famous for his stories of ambiguities,
leaves Bartleby's motive unclear and clouded.
What Bart-
leby 's passive resistance is against remains an unanswered
question, although critics have offered various views.
To some, Bartleby is rebelling against those dedicated to
financial profit, the "successful, workaday, bureaucratic
C "7
world,"
CO
and the "false gods of a dehumanized world."
At least one critic sees Bartleby as an object lesson of
what happens when man cuts himself off from society, the
^"^Richard Chase, ed. , Selected Tales and Poems of
Herman Melville (New York: Rinehart, 1950), viii.
polis:
^^Danforth Ross, The American Short Story (MinneaUniversity of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 15.
40
destruction which follows such action.
59
By far the majority of critics, however, identify
Bartleby either explicitly or implicitly with existentialism and the belief that man is born into a purposeless and
indifferent universe and lives a meaningless life which is
rendered absurd in death.
Bartleby, seeing clearly this
meaninglessness, symbolized by the blank wall, acts on his
knowledge "that no act of man, let alone belief, will ever
change the 'terrible' limits of the human heart."
Bart-
leby 's recognition of the nihilism of life causes his withdrawal and eventual death.
Arvin gives his summation of
Bartleby's story thus:
What Bartleby essentially dramatizes is not the
pathos of dementia praecox but the bitter metaphysical pathos of the human situation itself; the
cosmic irony of the truth that all are at once immitigably interdependent and immitigably forlorn. ^-'To James E. Miller, Bartleby has had a "vision of life's
futility which he cannot overcome.'•
To John Bernstein,
"The realization that mankind, whether in the Tombs or in
^^Egbert Oliver, "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'"
College English, VI (1945), p. 435.
60
Norman Springer, "Bartleby and the Terror of Limitation, " JPMLA, LXXX (1965), p. 418.
Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William
Sloane, 1950), p. 243.
62
.
. . .
James E. Miller, A Reader s Guide to Herman Melville (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1962), p.
160.
41
the 'outside' world, is everywhere imprisoned is what eventually destroys the scrivener."
Whatever dark vision
Bartleby has glimpsed, life to him has become a thing of
sterility and despair.
Some terrible hurt or some terrible
knowledge has caused Bartleby to "prefer not to" live and
to withdraw into death.
Situation Number 2 also encompasses the protagonist
of Sherwood Anderson's "Unused."
As Anthony Hilfer has
explained, Sherwood Anderson's characters "are continually
seeking to reach out, to break through the walls of emotional repression, to express their inner voices to another
64
human being."
Such is the case of May Edgley. May, very
bright in school and overly strict, reserved, and severe,
is the sole hope of a family of scoundrels, brothers addicted to alcohol and sisters who are "paid women. •' While
in school. May is temporarily successful in rising above
her situation and winning the approval of the village in
which she lives.
After graduation, however, she yields to
the sexual temptation of a local youth, Jerome Hadley, an
impulsive action which brings with it the full condemnation
of society.
John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the
Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague: Mouton, 1964),
p. 170.
64
Anthony Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1969), p. 152.
^2
Apparently this yielding is an attempt to communicate the longing May feels within herself but which she
is unable to articulate, a ••tender delicate thing. •'
There was a very tender delicate thing within her
many people had wanted to kill—that was certain.
To kill the delicate thing within was a passion
that obsessed mankind. All men and women tried to
do it. First the man or woman killed the thing
within himself, and then tried to kill it in others.
Men and women were afraid to let the thing live.^^
Anderson's characters often make gestures toward sympathy,
which usually take a sexual form that is "both expression
and betrayal of their primal impulse. . . . "
with May.
So it is
The sexual experience brings none of the com-
munication May hoped for.
The callous Jerome brags of his
conquest, and May is left alone, ostracized by a strict and
puritanical society, even condemned by her own sisters, who
looked upon her as being above such action.
In an effort to win approval of this society. May
resorts to lies about the affair, finally convincing even
herself and living in a world of fantasy which becomes for
her the only world.
Finally, May's "tender delicate thing
within her^' is completely destroyed by an unsympathetic
world.
She drowns herself, admitting defeat by a society
with no real understanding of the needs of the human heart.
65
York:
Sherwood Anderson, "Unused, '• Horses and Men (New
B. W. Huebach, 1923), pp. 76-77.
66
Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village, p. 153.
43
A further example of Situation 2 is '•Ethan Frome, •'
a stark, grim story by Edith Wharton, which deals with a
tragedy which has occurred twenty-four years before the
narrator arrives in Starkfield, Massachusetts.
The tragedy,
an unsuccessful attempted suicide, has left in its wake a
living death for the two thwarted lovers.
When the young
narrator, an engineer, first comes to Starkfield, he is
immediately attracted by the strange foreboding figure of
Ethan Frome, still ••the most striking figure in Stark67
field."
Badly crippled and looking far more than his
fifty-two years, Ethan reveals in his face "something bleak
and unapproachable," a look which "neither poverty nor
68
physical suffering could have put there."
Fascinated by
the mystery of Ethan, the narrator pieces together his
tragic story.
Ethan in his youth had aspired to a technical education and escape from the "sluggish pulse" of Starkfield.
After only one year at technical school, however, Ethan is
forced to return to a failing farm and sawmill.
Following
the death of his father, his mother, in poor health and
suffering from a loss of her mental faculties, is finally
cared for by Zeena, a distant relative, whom Ethan marries
67
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York:
Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. 3.
Ibid., p. 5.
Charles S.
44
when his mother dies.
Later, puzzling out to himself why
he had married this woman, several years his senior and
totally unsuited to him, he realizes that it came as a result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances:
his
intense loneliness in a demented mother's silence before
Zeena came, his broken communication with the outside world,
the bleak prospect of the lonely winter ahead, so that
. . . after the funeral, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm;
and before he knew it he had asked her to stay there
with him. He had often thought since that if his^g
mother had died in spring instead of winter . . .
And of course Ethan's plan was to sell the farm and try his
luck in a larger town.
Zeena, however, suddenly developing
a "sickliness, •' refused to leave Starkfield and became a
querulous, complaining nag, whose fancied ill health made
her "notable even in a community rich in pathological instances" 70 and whose medical care kept Ethan financially
drained.
Thus, Ethan's dream of escaping Starkfield and
making something of himself has come to nothing.
He is
trapped, both in a loveless marriage to a hypochondriac
harridan and in his fruitless and drudging labors on the
failing farm.
Ethan's world comes to life, however, with the arrival of Mattie, a relative of Zeena's, who comes to help
6g
Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 70.
^^Ibid., p. 71.
45
Zeena with the housework.
brantly alive.
Mattie is young, gay, and vi-
Ethan falls helplessly but innocently in
love with her and Mattie returns his love.
Their delight
in each other's presence becomes apparent to both when
Zeena makes an overnight trip to a new doctor, and they
have an evening alone, an evening which
produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established
intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have
given, and he set his imagination adrift on the
fiction that they had always spent their evenings
thus and would always go on doing so . . .
This idyllic daydreaming is shattered abruptly when Zeena
returns
and, evidently suspecting the mutual attraction,
proposes to send Mattie away.
The thought of separation from Mattie throws Ethan
into a turmoil of searching for a way out.
After a sleep-
less night and a half-finished note to Zeena, Ethan realizes
the "relentless conditions of his lot. •' If he leaves the
farm to Zeena, which he feels he must do, he and Mattie
will have nothing with which to start a new life.
He even
considers borrowing money under false pretenses, but his
sense of duty again intervenes as he thinks of Zeena ••whom
II72
his desertion would leave alone and destitute."
In despair, Ethan and Maggie begin their journey
to put Mattie on the train and out of Ethan's life forever.
'^•'-Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 90.
"^^Ibid., pp. 132, 145.
46
When they reach the village, on impulse they decide to take
a sled ride down the great hill, a ride they have promised
themselves for a long time.
At the top of the hill, Mattie
pleads with Ethan to drive the sled into the big elm at
the bottom of the hill.
Ethan tries to dissuade Mattie,
but •'Her sombre violence constrained him; she seemed the
embodied instrument of fate" and considering his empty life
without her, he consents.
But in the •'long delirious de-
scent" suddenly Zeena's face "with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrusts itself between him and his goal, and he
73
made an instinctive movement to brush it aside."
The
sled swerves, but Ethan thinks he has righted it when it
smashes into the giant elm at the foot of the hill.
The motives of Ethan and Mattie are quite clear at
this point—desperation at their separation, hopelessness
toward a condition they cannot reasonably expect to remedy,
despair at the thought of continuing life without the
other.
But Mattie and Ethan do not escape into oblivion
together.
They are only horribly mangled, Ethan to be
badly crippled and Mattie to be a helpless invalid, to be
cared for, ironically, by Zeena, who suddenly seems in
better health.
Ethan, always tormented by a family grave-
yard near the old farm, where ••for years that quiet company
had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and
Wharton, Ethan Frome, pp. 167, 170.
47
freedom,"
74
succumbs to a fate worse than theirs, a living
death with the two women of his life, both now querulous
drones.
As one of the neighbors remarks to the narrator,
I don't see there's much difference between the
Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the
graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet,
and the women have got to hold their tongues.^^
Three of Katherine Anne Porter's slender output of
short stories contain suicides, but in only one story,
"Noon Wine," is the suicide victim also the protagonist of
the story.
This protagonist is also a victim of Situation
Number 2 described by Klopfer.
The events of "Noon Wine"
center on the psychological effects of unpremeditated killing upon the perpetrator, Mr. Thompson.
As Miss Porter
herself has explained, it is "a story of miost painful moral
and emotional confusions, in which everyone concerned . . .
77
is trying to do right."
Mr. Thompson, "who had almost without knowing it
resigned himself to failure,"
78
and his sickly wife live
74
Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 50.
^^Ibid., p. 181.
76
Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter and 'Historic
Memory,'" Southern Renascence: The Literature of the
Modern South, ed. by Louis Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 282.
Katherine Anne Porter, "'Noon Wine': The
Sources," Yale Review, XLVI (1956), p. 30.
"^^Porter, "Noon Wine, " The Collected Stories of
Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, Inc., 1958), p. 234.
48
on a rather poor farm, neglected partly because of Mr.
Thompson's inability to cope with life and partly because
of his natural laziness.
The coming of the strange Mr.
Helton brings an almost miraculous change to the Thompson
fortunes.
Mr. Helton's industry soon has the farm neat,
tidy, and making a profit.
nine years.
This prosperity continues for
Helton's noncommittal nature, jerky mechanical
movements, and strange obsession with his collection of
harmonicas are overlooked by the Thompsons in the face of
their increasing prosperity and good standing in the community.
When a Mr. Hatch appears one day at the farm, Mr.
Thompson dislikes him on sight.
When Hatch informs him
that he has come to return Helton, an escaped mental patient
who has committed murder in another state, Mr. Thompson's
dislike turns to hatred.
The argument and fight that en-
sue when Mr. Helton appears result
in Mr. Thompson's kill-
ing Mr. Hatch with an ax—a killing Mr. Thompson thinks
he commits to save Mr. Helton's life—but the action is
confused in his mind and Mr. Helton does not bear the knife
wound Mr. Thompson thought he saw inflicted by Mr. Hatch.
Although the court acquits Mr. Thompson of murder, all the
rest of his life is spent in an effort to vindicate himself.
Thompson is honest enough to realize that his motives
were mixed but he also knows he did not premeditate the
murder.
His acquittal, however, does not make his act seem
49
less than murder to his neighbors.
As Thompson continues
his battle with his conscience, he begins making the rounc3s
of his neighbors, taking his wife with him to swear his innocence, an innocence in which she does not really believe.
Thompson's moment of truth comes when he starts out
of his sleep, frightening his wife into an hysterical faint
Summoning his sons, Mr. Thompson sees distrust in their
eyes too and realizes "the last strokes of his swift, sure
79
doom.^^
Comprehending the rejection of even his wife and
sons, Thompson realizes he is utterly alone in his fight,
a fight no longer worth fighting with his family's faith
in him gone.
Taking a rifle from the cabinet.
He went out of the house without looking around,
or looking back when he left it, passed his barn
without seeing it, and struck out to the farthest
end of his fields.
Thompson, the only character in this study to leave a suicide note, continues his protest of innocence in his last
message.
Then,
. . . trembling
he lay down flat
the barrel under
trigger with his
work it.
and his head . . . drumming . . .
on the earth on his side, drew
his chin and fumbled for the
great toe. That way he could
"^^Harry J. Mooney, The Fiction and Criticism of
Katherine Anne Porter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957), p. 42.
^Oporter, "Noon Wine," p. 267.
®^Ibid., p. 268.
50
The suicide victim in "Flowering Judas" by Katherine Anne Porter does not even appear in the story, yet the
suicide is important.
The story, set in Mexico, concerns
revolutionary activities in which Laura, the main character,
is involved.
Eugenio, a revolutionary confined to prison,
uses drugs Laura takes him to end his life, presumably to
escape from a desperate situation which he considers hopeless.
For the protagonist, Laura, however, there seems to
be a martyr motivation for Eugenie's death.
This judgment
will be discussed later in Chapter III.
Situation 3'
Several of Ambrose Bierce's characters find themselves in Situation Number 3, described by Klopfer as "a
counterphobic reaction to death," in which the expectation
of death seems so unbearable that the person runs to meet
death to put an end to the horror of dreading it.
In •'A Tough Tussle" young Brainerd Byring, a Federal
officer in the Civil War, has an obsessional hatred of the
dead.
"The sight of the dead . . . had always intolerably
affected him" and he "felt a kind of reasonless antipathy.
He could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which
82
had in it an element of resentment."
Forced to stay in
the same position on guard duty, Byring is compelled to
^^Ambrose Bierce, "A Tough Tussle," Collected Works,
III, p. 108.
51
confront a dead Confederate soldier all night.
In the shift-
ing shadows of the moonlight, Byring becomes convinced of
something supernatural about the dead body, even imagining
that the corpse moves and changes position.
comes a supernatural horror to Byring.
The corpse be-
Following a skirmish
in the early morning hours, the fatigue party discovers
Lieutenant Byring stabbed by his own sword and multiple
sword wounds in the decaying corpse of the Confederate private.
Lieutenant Byring, pushed to the brink of insanity
by his horrible experience, has rushed to meet the death
he finds so loathsome.
In "One of the Missing" Jerome Searing also lets the
horror of death deprive him of his life.
On a reconnaissance
mission. Searing, a private in Sherman•s army, misinterprets
a
relatively harmless situation as being an extremely dan-
gerous one.
Trapped in the debris of a building destroyed
by a random shot from enemy artillery. Searing becomes conscious of the barrel of his rifle pointing directly at his
head.
Knowing that he cocked the rifle moments before the
accident. Searing, •'man of courage, the formidable enemy,
the strong, resolute warrior, was as pale as a ghost. He
83
was not insane—he was terrified."
Woodruff calls this
84
story the "study of a mind coming unhinged."
Searing,
Bierce, ••One of the Missing, •' Collected Works,
II, p. 88
Stuart C. Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose
Bierce: A Study in Polarity (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1964), p. 26.
52
progressing from terror to hysterical panic, finally works
a board free from the debris and pushes the trigger of his
gun to end his horror.
Ironically, his gun had been dis-
charged in the collapsing debris, but, as Bierce puts it,
"it did its work," for Searing dies of sheer fright.
The
horror of death has succeeded in destroying Searing.
Captain Graffenreid in "One Officer, One Man" mis85
^
interprets both the situation and his own character.
The
young officer looks forward joyously to actual combat in
the Civil War:
'•Thinking himself a courageous man, his
spirit was buoyant."
At the first volley of cannons, how-
ever, his conception of war and of himself undergoes a sudden change.
'•Was it fear?
He feared it was.'^
Seeing his
own fear and forced to lie beside a recently slaughtered
man, he feels his nerves give way.
"Nothing suggested a
soldier's death nor mitigated the loathsomeness of the in86
cident."
Thinking he is still in grave danger and recog-
nizing his cowardice, he plunges his own sword into his
body, thus freeing himself from what he discovered as the
"loathsomeness" of war.
85
M. E. Grenander, "Bierce's Turn of the Screw:
Tales of Ironical Terror," Western Humanities Review, XI
(1957), p. 263.
^^Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," Collected Works,
II, pp. 203, 204.
53
George Thurston, in Bierce's story of the same
name, tries to subdue his cowardice by recklessly exposing himself to danger, even to the extent of refusing to
surrender and striding into the enemy lines, arms folded
across his breast and head erect.
As the stuttering quar-
termaster analyzes his foolhardy bravery, "It's h-is w-ay
of m-m-astering a c-c-consti-t-tu-tional t-tendency to
87
r-un aw-ay."
tle at all.
Ironically, Thurston does not die in batAs the author states, "This intrepid man,
George Thurston, died an ignoble death."
Joining a group
of soldiers amusing themselves on a fifty-foot swing,
again he overcompensates for his inherent cowardice and,
heedless of warnings, he swings too high and falls from
the swing.
The impact of his body's hitting the earth made
"these men, familiar with death in its most awful aspects,
turn sick." Rushing to his corpse, the soldiers see a
horribly mangled body, but "The arms were folded tightly
88
across the breast."
Thurston, fighting bravely his "tendency to run away," has rushed to meet death.
Situation 4
Situation Number 4 is illustrated in Dreiser's
"The Lost Phoebe" and Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall
87
Bierce, "George Thurston," Collected Works, II,
p. 212.
88ibid., pp. 214, 217.
54
Enter First," for in both these stories suicide is motivated by the desire for reunion with a dead loved one.
Apparently, these victims have no clear idea of how the
reunion will take place but simply want to be with the one
person who carried all the meaning of life.
Dreiser, in his short story "The Lost Phoebe,"
carefully builds the relationship of his elderly couple
who •'were as fond of each other as it is possible for two
old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be
fond of."
Old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phoebe Ann
have had seven children in their long life together.
How-
ever, three children have died and all the others have
become so involved with their own families they give •'little
thought as to how it might be with their mother and fa89
ther."
Only one girl even lives within the same state
and she seldom visits.
When Phoebe dies, Henry lives in a dreamlike state
of general neglect.
He takes less and less interest in
the few chores around the run-down farm.
Five months after
his wife's death, he wakes in the night and thinks he sees
her standing in the moonlight of their cabin.
Quickly,
Henry passes from illusion to actual hallucination, expecting Phoebe to return momentarily.
He gets an idea
89
Theodore Dreiser, "The Lost Phoebe, •' The Greatest American Short Stories, ed. by A. Grove Day (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 200.
55
into his disordered mind that he and Phoebe have quarreled
and that she has left him.
His sole purpose becomes find-
ing his "lost Phoebe. •' He begins by making the round of
the neighbors, telling them they have quarreled and inquiring of her whereabouts.
For several years he pursues
his endless search, often not even returning to his cabin
at night but taking a few utensils with him and "camping
out^^ in the countryside.
From asking at doors, he pro-
gresses to wandering through the countryside, calling
Phoebe's name.
In the seventh year of his wanderings, he
camps near Red Cliff, a sheer mountain precipice.
In the
early hours of the morning, he awakes and thinks he sees
Phoebe as a young girl, moving ahead of him in the moonlight like a will o'the wisp.
Coming to the edge of the
cliff, Henry sees Phoebe below in the apple trees blooming
in the spring.
Crying her name, he leaps—ecstatic that
he has at last found Phoebe.
"No one of all the simple
population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his
90
lost mate."
Clearly, the old man's mind disintegrates after
the loss of his wife.
His overdependence on his wife makes
it impossible for Henry to cope rationally with existence
91
without her.
He becomes very depressed, for he has no
^^reiser, "The Lost Phoebe," p. 214.
Austin M. Wright, The American Short Story in
the Twenties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961),
p. 222.
~)0
one to whom he can communicate his grief, and an unbearable situation results.
He relieves his despair tempor-
arily by living in his dream world and by searching for
Phoebe, and he relieves it permanently when he leaps from
the cliff to rejoin his Phoebe.
Another instance of this situation is found in
Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First," in which
the suicide victim is a small boy deprived of the love and
understanding he needs in his time of grief at the loss of
his mother.
Although his mother has died over a year be-
fore, Norton has not recovered from his grief, a grief
which his father considers "not a normal grief" and "all
92
part of his selfishness."
The father, a part-time coun-
selor at the reformatory, takes into the home Rufus Johnson,
a fourteen-year-old delinquent with an I. Q. bordering on
genius.
Rufus, incorrigible from the first, frightens
Norton and angers him by going into his mother's room and
scattering her personal belongings.
Norton begs his father
not to keep Rufus, but Mr. Sheppard only upbraids him for
his "selfishness."
Sheppard, while making an all-out effort to rehabilitate Rufus and train his brilliant mind, ignores the
needs of his own "mediocre" son.
Rufus, on the other
92
Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First,"
Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1956), p. 146.
57
hand, convinces Norton that Norton's dead mother still
exists in a heaven beyond the stars.
Norton spends hours
in the attic looking through the telescope Sheppard bought
to "broaden^' Rufus' horizons and which Rufus has largely
ignored.
On the night Rufus spitefully violates his parole
by vandalism and is picked up by the police, Norton, believing he has seen his mother in a star, hangs himself
from the rafters of the attic.
Unable to cope with life
as it is, with his father lavishing all his attention and
affection on the delinquent Rufus, and wishing desperately
to be again with the mother of whose love he was sure,
Norton leaves his father to his "good works."
Situation 5
Situation Number 5, the most peculiar of the situations described by Klopfer, involves a person's search for
freedom and the resulting almost whimsical suicide, which
indicates a desire not to be committed to life or anything
it contains.
A possible example of this situation is found
in the character of Amy in Katherine Anne Porter's '•Old
Mortality. •' The precise motivation for the suicide cannot
be determined in this story, and the more important factor
is the effect of Amy's death on the protagonist, Miranda,
an effect which will be discussed in detail in Chapter III.
However, the legend of the beautiful Aunt Amy indicates
some possibility that her death was a result of her search
58
for freedom and her refusal to be tied down to life and
its representative values and responsibilities.
Miranda, the central character of the story, has
grown up with the legend of her beautiful Aunt Amy.
Stories
of her beauty, her many suitors, her long rejection and
eventual acceptance of Gabriel, their marriage, and Amy's
death after only six weeks of marriage have constituted
the family's romanticized view of the past, a preoccupation
Miranda eventually terms obsessive.
The story concerns
Miranda's disillusionment with and final rejection of this
romanticism, a romanticism centered in Amy, who, through
lack of proper care of her tuberculosis and perhaps by an
overdose of medicine, precipitates her own death, possibly
in the same rejection that Miranda effects--a rejection of
a life of false conceptions and values.
Situation 6
Both Hamlin Garland's "Daddy Deering'^ and Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" illustrate characters enmeshed in
Situation Number 6, which Klopfer calls a person's desire
for closure of a full life.
In Hamlin Garland's "Daddy Deering," the author
sympathetically presents an old man who outlives his usefulness.
Milton, the young farm boy narrator, first meets
Daddy when he comes to help thresh wheat on their farm.
Daddy is old even then, sixty or more, but Milton observes
59
that "At some far time vast muscles must have rolled on
those giant limbs. . . . "
He is still able to perform his
work admirably, always taking on the hardest and dirtiest
tasks, as if to prove his endurance and ability remain.
Milton, who does not share Daddy's enthusiasm for farm
labor, at first resents the boisterous old man and his always unfinished tales.
Later, however, he develops a fond-
ness and acMiration for the oldster, even though Daddy is
often the object of good-natured ridicule by the other men.
The old man's joy in work extends to other chores besides
threshing, as Milton learns when winter and hog-killing
time comes.
Daddy takes particular delight in hog-killing.
His pride in his ability to catch and properly kill
a hog was as genuine as the old knight-errant's
pride in his ability to stick a knife into another
steel-clothed brigand like himself. ^-^
Scolding and chafing the boys the entire time. Daddy takes
enormous pride in the skinning process, considering the
finished hog a work of art.
But even above his delight in farm work is Daddy's
love for the fiddle, which he plays for the country square
dances.
Milton now sees a different side of Daddy, but
the characteristic fervor is there.
Daddy is always start-
lingly clean at the dances, even topping his old red work
Hamlin Garland, "Daddy Deering, •' Other Main
Travelled Roads (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910),
pp. 122, 126.
60
shirt with a paper collar for the festive occasions.
Flushing with pleasure at the sound of his own music, the
old man fiddles, calls the squares, and even takes part in
the dancing, kicking and stamping madly as the musicians
play faster and faster.
Milton is delighted with the an-
tics of Daddy Deering as he watches him thoroughly enjoying himself.
As Milton grows toward manhood, however, he sees
changes in the country and in the general feeling toward
Daddy Deering.
His fiddling is now considered old-fash-
ioned and obsolete.
Fewer and fewer people welcome Daddy
into their homes as the old ones die and many of the others
move away.
•'There were few homes where the old man was
even a welcome visitor and he felt this rejection keenly." 94
Now when Daddy works, the other men give him the easier
jobs, much to Daddy's resentment and dismay.
Their good-
natured joking and fun poking give way to a compassion
hard for Daddy to endure.
"Men began to pity him rather
than laugh at him, which hurt him more than their ridi95
cule."
Long after he is able. Daddy continues to work,
although heavy farm labor becomes more and more of an effort for him.
Suddenly two accidents end both Daddy's
94
Garland, "Daddy Deering," p. 134.
95
Ibid.
61
working days and his fiddle playing.
His left hand is
mangled in farm machinery, and shortly after, he cuts his
foot with an ax, laming himself.
Both accidents come as
a result of a drastic slowing of Daddy's formerly alert
reflexes.
hand.
The accidents are traumatic for the old farm
"The pain was not so much physical as mental.
brought age and decay close to him.
m
It
For the first time
his life he felt that he was fighting a losing battle."
96
From this time on Daddy Deering is a wasted ghost
of his former blustering, boisterous self, as he begins
"to think and to tremble," sitting huddled by his old stove,
wrapped in a quilt.
When Milton visits him, he is shaken
by the horrible change in the old man who "had gloried in
his strength" and who now is a pitiful, helpless creature.
Milton returns home, worried and fearing Daddy's death is
near.
The very next morning. Daddy's hired hand runs
wildly into Milton's home, declaring, "Daddy's killed himself."
When Milton arrives at Daddy's house, he finds
him lying in the yard, half-covered with snow, a revolver
in his hand.
But to Milton's intense relief, "there was
no mark on him. "
Daddy Deering had not fired the gun in
his hand, but a very welcome death had come at last to the
old pioneer spirit, who need fear no more the wasting of
his great strength.
Milton, relief and grief intermingling
^^Garland, "Daddy Deering," p. 136.
62
as he gazed at the body, observed.
There was a sort of majesty in the figure half
buried in the snow. His hands were clenched,
and there was a frown of resolution on his
face, as if he had fancied Death coming, and
had gone defiantly forth to meet him.^^
Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" also presents a character
seeking closure to a life which has achieved its purpose,
although that purpose has succeeded in destroying the
moral fiber of Ethan Brand.
Brand's suicide is an almost
ritualistic act in which he leaps into the fire which had
provided his inspiration eighteen years before.
During
all these years. Brand sought the world over for the Unpardonable Sin, only to find it at last in his own soul.
Returning to his former home, he describes the sin to a
group of villagers as the "sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence
for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty
claims."
His quest has been one for knowledge, gained
without love, and one which desecrates mankind by "psychological experiment."
His obsessive desire for knowledge
drove him until "he had lost hold of the magnetic chain
of humanity."
His quest ended and his mission completed,
Brand returns to the lime-kiln he formerly tended and
from which he "had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from
the hot furnace . . .
to confer with him about the
97
Garland, "Daddy Deering," pp. 136, 139.
63
Unpardonable Sin"
and leaps into its fiery depths after
the villagers have returned to their homes.
Critics have offered varied explanations of Brand's
suicide.
Vanderbilt calls his final act "inevitable^' be-
cause of his complete isolation from man and sees Brand
as anticipating the Existential rebel of modern fiction in
his failure to seek the forgiveness of a merciful God.
Levy calls Brand a success and calls his quest •'a parable
of how to succeed at spiritual self-destruction."
McCullen and Guilds designate Brand "the one fit sacrifice
which he can hurl upon the altar of his acknowledged master, Satan."
Indeed, nowhere in the story does Brand show evidence of remorse or regret for his deed.
As Brand sits
alone in the night beside the lime-kiln, he surveys his
past life and the gradual change which has been wrought in
it.
He began his quest for knowledge with sympathy and
98
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," American
Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century (London: J. M.
Dent & Sons, 1930), pp. 66, 77, 60.
99
Kermit Vanderbilt, '•The Unity of Hawthorne's
'Ethan Brand,'" College English, XXIV (1963), p. 455.
100
Alfred J. Levy, "'Ethan Brand' and the Unpardonable Sin," Boston University Studies in English, V (1961),
p. 183.
101
Joseph T. McCullen and John C. Guilds, ••The Unpardonable Sin in Hawthorne: A Re-Examination, •• Nineteenth
Century Fiction, XV (1960), p. 235.
64
pity for mankind, but his "vast intellectual development"
overshadowed any development of his heart until '•it had
contracted . . . hardened . . . perished. •• His analysis
of his situation seems a completely objective one, devoid
of regret.
During his reverie, he announces that "were
it to do again, would I incur the guilt" and "Unshrink10 2
ingly, I accept the retribution."
This admission ne-
gates any possibility that Brand commits suicide in remorse
for his loss of humaneness or in a fit of depression because he has become totally cut off from his fellow man.
McCullen and Guilds call
the Unpardonable S m
his willful impenitence itself
103
and the point of the story.
In reality. Brand has come full circle and has returned to his beginning for his end.
His sense of comple-
tion of his quest echoes in his words, "What more have I
to seek?
done."
What more to achieve?
My task is done, and well
Brand is apparently ready and willing to die, even
knowing that he is condemned to Satan.
Standing upon the
rim of the lime-kiln, he bids farewell to Mother Earth,
mankind whom he has cast off, and the stars of heaven.
But
his direct address goes to the fire of the furnace and supposedly the devil residing therein as this Faust-like
102Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," pp. 74, 66.
103
McCullen and Guilds, p. 236.
65
figure leaps to his fiery death with the words "Embrace
me, as I do thee.""'"^'^
Situation 7
Another story of Flannery O'Connor's, "The River,"
provides the sole example of Situation Number 7 which
Klopfer calls "a longing for spiritual rebirth."
As in
her "The Lame Shall Enter First," the suicide victim is
a small child, an "innocent.'•
Harry Ashfield, "four or
five," is the small son of negligent parents who leave
his care to a succession of nursemaids and baby sitters.
Mrs. Connin, one of his sitters, takes Harry to a •'healing" and baptismal service at a river.
Discovering that
Harry has never been baptized, Mrs. Connin hands the child
over to the preacher, who immerses him in the river and
promises him that baptism will make him •'count now^^ and
that he will "be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ . . .
105
by the river of life.'•
Harry, who has never counted
with his indifferent parents and whose home has consisted
of an apartment filled with the dirty glasses and cigarette butts of innumerable cocktail parties, takes the
preacher's words literally instead of metaphorically.
•^^^Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," pp. 75, 76.
105
Flannery O'Connor, "The River," A Good Man Is
Hard to Find (New York: New American Library, 1953),
p. 34.
66
The following morning, arising while his parents
are still sleeping off hangovers and, as usual, having
to scavenge for something to eat in the littered apartment,
Harry yearns for the sense of significance he felt during
the baptism.
Suddenly filled with a longing to return to
the river and find the Kingdom of Christ, he leaves the
apartment, not taking a suitcase "because there was nothing
from there he wanted to keep."
Arriving at the river, he
plunges in, until "the waiting current caught him like a
106
long gentle hand and pulled swiftly forward and down.^'
Thus, Harry, unwanted and uncared for, finds salvation
from a world of indifference and perhaps also finds the
Kingdom of Christ.
•"•^^O"Connor, "The River," pp. 38, 40.
CHAPTER III
EFFECTS OF THE SUICIDES ON SURVIVORS
For the majority of the short stories in this study,
the suicide came at the very end of the stories and any
effect on other characters was unknown.
In the remaining
stories, however, the effects on the surviving characters
fall into three main categories:
(1)
initiation into
the real world or a growth to a new awareness of life as
a result of the suicide, (2)
a sense of guilt for having
been responsible or partly responsible for the suicide,
and (3)
a failure to accept responsibility in the suicide
when responsibility is clearly apparent.
Aside from these
categories is the effect on those characters whose suicide
attempts were unsuccessful and their feelings when their
attempts to destroy themselves have failed.
"Indian Camp,'• a typical Nick Adams story and very
likely the first one,
is basically concerned with Nick's
initiation into the harsher realities of life.
Nick wit-
nesses the cycle of life in this story—a painful, unnatural birth and a violent, self-inflicted death.
The
suicide of the young father introduces Nick harshly to
the existence of death and its horror.
Nick sees the
Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York:
hart, 1952), p. 261.
67
Rine-
68
2
Indian with "his throat cut from ear to ear.^'
That Nick
is shaken by the experience is revealed later in the boat
when he questions his father about suicide and death.
The
dialogue between the father and son reveals what the story
is really about:
"the question of endurance, the question
3
of suicide, and the relationship of father to son.^'
Through his father's wisdom and understanding, Nick is reassured and at the end of the story "sitting in the stern
of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure
4
that he would never die.^'
The effect of Bartleby's death on the lawyer narrator of "Bartleby the Scrivener" is significant but puzzling.
To most critics the lawyer narrator is actually
the main character of the tale and its primary concern is
the effect of Bartleby's death on the narrator.
Just what
the narrator learns as a result of his experience, however,
is a point of controversy.
Even the narrator's final
statement concerning Bartleby is in itself ambiguous.
The
critic John V. Hagopian believes that Bartleby "aroused
his pity, drove him to distraction, and finally initiated
him to the brotherhood of those who know the sad truth
2
Ernest Hemingway, "Indian Camp,'• The Short Stories
of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1927), p. 94.
3
Young, Ernest Hemingway, p. 30.
4
Hemingway, "Indian Camp," p. 95.
69
5
about the human condition."
Kingsley Widmer stresses
the fact that "Bartleby•s perversity has forced the narrator to recognize the nihilism of life which he has sys6
tematically denied. ••
Both Widmer and Frank Davidson see
Bartleby as simply another part of the narrator's self,
"the bland attorney's specter of rebellious and irrational
7
will" who haunts him and leaves a distinct impression on
the narrator of his worth.
A more optimistic effect on the narrator is expressed by John Bernstein:
The lawyer outgrows his initial position of callousness and lack of concern for his fellows and comes
to realize that no man is an island, that to be
human means to be involved with the human situation.^
Leon S. Roudiez thinks the narrator learns, through the
death of Bartleby, that isolation from society is disas9
trous and destroys the individual.
Danforth Ross considers
Bartleby's death a sacrifice which reveals to the narrator
^John V. Hagopian, "Melville's 'L'Homme Revolt,'"
English Studies, XLVI (1965), p. 390.
^Kingsley Widmer, The Literary Rebel (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. 52.
7
Frank Davidson, '•'Bartleby': A Few Observations,"
Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 27 (1962), p. 26.
Q
John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the
Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague: Mouton, 1963),
p. 17.
9
Leon S. Roudiez, "Strangers in Melville and Camus,"
French Review, XXXI (1958), p. 437.
70
the hollowness of his own life and the fact that he has
been up to this point spiritually dead and will perhaps
become more spiritually alive as a result of Bartleby's
death. 10
Exactly what Bartleby's death communicates to the
lawyer rests with Melville, but it is clear from the story
that the narrator's complacency has been severely shaken.
He no longer looks at himself with the smug satisfaction
displayed earlier.
He also realizes that his and all man-
kind's compassion is totally insufficient for the need.
However, his compassion for both Bartleby and mankind
finds voice in his cry, "Oh Bartleby, Oh humanity!" after
the death of the strange scrivener.
For Miranda, in "Old Mortality," the legend of
Aunt Am^ which ends in her suicide, serves as the center
of the romantic past as idealized by Miranda's family.
In
the three sections of the story, Miranda is eight, ten,
and eighteen years old respectively.
These sections show
the gradual disillusionment of Miranda and her growing
awareness of the contrast between the romanticized picture
of the family and the past as preserved by elders and the
concrete evidence she discovers in her growth toward maturity.
When Mirancaa is ten, she meets Gabriel, the fableci
suitor anca husbanci of the beautiful Amy.
This meeting
Danforth Ross, The American Short Story, p. 16.
71
brings home to Mirancia at least part of the falsity of
the family myth, for now she sees Gabriel for what he is:
a fat, red-faceci man given to cirinking anci gambling.
When
Mirancia is eighteen and meets her Cousin Eva on the train
returning home for Gabriel's funeral, her disillusionment
with Aunt Amy is furthered as the deeply embittered Eva
reveals her extreme hatred for Amy and the entire family,
hinting at a scandal surrounding Amy and openly asserting
Gabriel's unhappiness during the honeymoon.
Eva's exag-
geration of the evil in the family causes Miranda to reject her warped view but also causes her to complete her
rejection of the family's equally warped view of the past.
Miranda is determined to form her own perspective, cutting
loose all family ties.
Ray B. West calls Miranda "any
child, anywhere, seeking to come to terms with her past
11
and her present—seeking definition. •'
At the story's
close, Miranda has not found the truth, but she has discovered what the truth is not.
She is also determined to
continue her search as she promises herself, '•At least I
can know the truth about what happens to me. . . ."
But
Miss Porter hints that Miranda's optimistic outlook for
the future promises further disillusionment as she adds
1 Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter and 'Historic
Memory,'" Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, ed. by Louis D. Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 289.
72
that Miranda makes this vow "in her hopefulness, her ig1.12
norance."
Characters in both "Flowering Judas" and "The Lame
Shall Enter First" experience a sense of guilt and remorse
for what they consider their blame in the suicides in
these stories.
In "Flowering Judas^' Laura is the unwit-
ting instrument for Eugenio's death.
She takes drugs to
Eugenio in prison, supposedly to relieve his boredom and
sense of frustration, while awaiting his release.
Eugenio uses the drugs to end his life.
But
Reinforcing
Laura's sense of guilt is a nightmare she experiences the
night after Eugenio's death.
In this dream Eugenio accuses
Laura of murdering him and forces her to eat of the blossoms of the Judas tree which grows in the courtyard below
Laura's window.
Laura's sense of betrayal of Eugenio and
of the revolution are evident in the nightmare.
Before
Eugenie's death, ever since she has been in Mexico, Laura
has been determined "to serve the revolutionary ideal and
13
at the same time hold herself above corruption."
Seeing
the corruption of such revolutionaries as Braggioni has
caused Laura to perceive a disparity between her way of
12
Katherine Anne Porter, "Old Mortality," The Collected Stories of Katherine Porter (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World, Inc., 1958), p. 221.
13
Charles Allen, "Southwestern Chronicle: Katherine Anne Porter, •' Arizona Quarterly, II (1946), p. 91.
73
life and her feeling of what life should be.
But her
aloofness has resulted in isolation from her fellow men
and an incapability for genuine human feeling or passion.
As Ray B. West has pointed out, Laura is incapable of adequate emotional response in three areas of her life:
Laura has supposedly forsaken her Catholicism, although
she still sneaks into church infrequently to try to pray;
in the revolution, Laura cannot participate in the revolutionary fervor of the other workers; and in erotic love,
Laura responds to none of her three suitors.
14
She is
even unable to respond warmly to the small children she
teaches.
Eugenie's death and the consequent dream reveal
to Laura her betrayal of both Eugenio and the revolution
as an ideal.
Hendrick sums up Laura's guilt thus:
Without courage to disentangle herself, she drifts
along in the movement, is filled with despair,
feeds on the lives of others, and realizes the full
extent of her betrayal only in a symbolic dream.15
In "The Lame Shall Enter First" Sheppard comes to
at least a partial recognition of his failure with his son
and of his blame in his death.
When Sheppard finally real-
izes his son needs him more than any delinquent does, it
is too late.
Dashing up the attic stairs, Sheppard sees
his child hanging "in the jungle of shadows, just below
l^Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter: Symbol and
Theme in 'Flowering Judas,'" Accent, VII (1947), p. 185.
15
George Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter (New York:
Twayne, 1965), p. 41.
74
the beam from which he had launched his flight into space."
Sheppard's ••heart constricted with a repulsion for himself
so clear and intense that he gasped for breath.
He had
stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton."
Sheppard sees now how sterile Norton's existence has been
and how starved for love and affection the child w a s — a
love and affection he as his father had denied him.
In two of the stories of this study, the effect on
some of the remaining characters is one of unassumed responsibility for blame with ironic overtones.
In Crane's
••Maggie," the relatives of Maggie react to her death in
ways which reveal their superficiality and total lack of
emotional depth.
When Jimmie, Maggie's brother, announces
Maggie's death to her mother, Mary Johnson dissolves into
howling grief, but significantly this showy display of
grief comes only after she finishes the meal she is eating.
She proceeds to mourn dramatically, finally holding a pair
of Maggie's faded baby shoes and being consoled by her
neighbors, who mouth religious platitudes about Maggie's
having "gone where her sins will be judged" and about the
fact that "Deh Lord gives and de Lord takes away."
Appar-
ently, Mary feels no guilt for Maggie's death and is reacting as she thinks she is expected to react for the
benefit of the neighbors.
The story ends with Mary's
-I (1
Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First,"
p. 154.
75
screaming, "Oh, yes, I'll forgive herl
I'll forgive her."
Jimmie, on the other hand, curses when ordered by his
mother to claim Maggie's body and bring it home, leaving
17
the tenement with a "dragging reluctant step.^'
Clearly,
both Maggie's mother and brother assume no responsibility
for Maggie's tragic death.
They see her life and her
death as only a nuisance or something to be forgiven by
them while they obtusely refuse to realize that they are
in reality the major cause of Maggie's fate.
The effect of Lieutenant Brayle's heroic suicide
in "Killed at Resaca" is at once the expected and an ironic
one, but the person responsible for his death does not assume that responsibility.
The expected effect is regis-
tered by the soldiers in the field.
At the moment of
Brayle's courageous rush into the open field to deliver a
message to another flank of the army, his fellow soldiers,
inspired by his bravery, swarmed into the open, giving him
cover fire in an effort to save his life.
When he is
killed, the stretcher bearers "moved unmolested into the
field, and made straight for Brayle's body."
Even the
enemy honors such bravery by stopping the battle and playing a dirge on drums as "A generous enemy honored the
18
fallen brave."
The effect on the responsible one, however, is altogether different. The narrator of the story.
17
Crane, "Maggie, •• pp. 153, 154
18Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," pp. 100, 102
76
a comrade of Brayle's, delivers a letter found on Brayle's
body which showed the cause of his foolhardy actions:
his
sweetheart's fear that he would not perform bravely in
battle.
The girl, ironically, is repulsed by the sight
of the blood on the letter and flings it into the fire.
She accepts no responsibility in his death, seemingly
making no connection between her letter and Brayle's heroic
but foolhardy action.
Brayle's death, caused by this girl,
is utterly meaningless to her.
In both "Ethan Frome" and "Big Blonde" the wouldbe suicides do not succeed.
In neither case is there a
sense of relief at being snatched back from the jaws of
death.
The characters' hopelessness and despair only con-
tinue.
Although Ethan's thoughts are not revealed, it is
clear from the details of the story that his fate is worse
than his proposed death as he is forced to live with the
consequences of his action:
the spiteful Zeena and the
once vibrant Mattie who is changed to a helpless, whining
invalid.
Ethan's face, with its "bleak and unapproachable"
look, betrays his years of suffering and despair as he is
forced to endure his tragic and hopeless existence.
On the other hand, in "Big Blonde, •' Hazel's
thoughts are revealed and her desperation graphically
shown as she realizes that her attempt to escape from her
dreary existence has failed.
The picture of the pathetic
old worn-out work horses stumbling and dragging themselves
77
along the streets flashes through her mind as she sees
herself wearily plodding through the meaningless years
ahead.
Evidently, both Ethan and Hazel regret that life
did not end for them as they had planned.
In the remaining stories of this study, the suicides have no discernible effect on any of the surviving
characters, usually because the suicide occurs at the very
ends of the stories.
The only effect of these suicides is
the impact on the reader, and this is a part of the overall theme.
This effect, therefore, will be discussed in
the following chapter.
CHAPTER IV
THE AUTHORS'PURPOSES IN USING
THE SUICIDE THEME
The aim of any serious student of literature is
to arrive at the author's purpose or commentary on life
that emerges from any particular work.
This commentary
is usually thought of as the theme, the view of life as
the author sees it through his characters, their actions,
and reactions to the circumstances in which they are
placed.
Regardless of how carefully a work is read and
studied, no reader can be certain about an author's intention or purpose.
Therefore the judgments and inferences
set forth in this chapter may be incorrect at times since
they are often the product of this researcher's own interpretation .
Within this area of study, each author's purpose
seems closely intertwined with his assignment of responsibility for the suicide within a given story.
Of course,
any suicide is largely the responsibility of the person
who kills himself.
Other forces, however, figure promin-
ently in many of the stories.
In these stories, it is
quite clear that the characters would not have committed
suicide had they lived in different circumstances.
Three
categories emerge when the authors' purposes are viewed
78
79
in this light.
The first category involves stories in
which the responsibility for the suicide lies almost completely with the weaknesses which become so pronounced,
with or without other influences, that they lead to selfdestruction.
In these cases, the author's purpose may
be a warning against allowing such character flaws to
gain control.
Secondly, some stories cast blame on other
characters, who, by their lack of consideration, neglect,
or brutality, drive the victims to suicide.
The author' s
purpose in such instances may be a condemnation of such
brutal qualities.
Last, often the author suggests that
society or the particular environment is partly to blame
for the suicide.
Although it is true that environment
actually consists of both living conditions and other persons, in this present chapter, environment is considered
only the living conditions surrounding the character, the
situation in society into which he is placed, or society
itself in terms of such things as materialism or moral
conventions.
In stories of this category, the author's
purpose may be a criticism of sordid living conditions or
a condemnation of society as a whole.
Of course, such
categorization is arbitrary since all three of these aspects are involved in all suicides.
There is no way to
separate a personality from the environmental forces surrounding him, both his living conditions and the people
80
with whom he is closely associated.
For the purposes of
this study, however, an attempt was made to discover the
author's view as to which aspect was most prominent in
each instance of suicide.
In Fitzgerald's "May Day" Gordon Sterrett is
largely responsible for his eventual suicide.
Fitzgerald
shows the weaknesses of this character from the beginning--his inability to pursue diligently his art, his susceptibility to women such as Jewel Hudson, and his overall lack of drive to attain the wealth and success he
supposedly desires.
Although environment plays a p a r t —
Sterrett does not have the inherited wealth of his former
classmates—Fitzgerald places most of the responsibility
on Sterrett's shoulders for his degeneration and final
self-destruction.
Hawthorne has a similar approach, as Richard H.
Fogle has pointed out in his study: " . . . for Hawthorne
the moral meanings of things were inseparable from their
aesthetic value and significance; his creative imagination and his moral perceptions are not to be disentwined"
1
Almost any Hawthorne story will have a moral, many times
stated within the story itself, and presumably the pointing
Richard H. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light
and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952),
p. 43.
81
out of this moral is the main purpose of the author.
It
is clear from "Ethan Brand" that Hawthorne is pointing
out that man is in danger of committing an unpardonable
sin and alienating himself from mankind and God.
Critics
of this story, however, disagree as to what comprises the
unpardonable sin.
Fogle calls the sin one of "Inconceiv2
able pride, which has alienated him from God and man."
Mark Van Doren says the sin lies in the search itself and
also ••in the violence he has done to the souls of others.'•
A. N. Kaul points out that Brand's sin is not intellectual
inquiry but occurred when "in the pride of his intellectual power, he willfully alienates himself from human4
ity."
Whatever precisely Hawthorne meant by the Unpar-
donable Sin, it led to a divorcement of Brand from humanity and a sympathy with his fellow man.
This isolation,
Hawthorne seems to be saying, is not only an evil threat
to the entire human race, but fatal to the one who commits
this sin.
He uses Brand's suicide to show the destruc-
tion of a man engulfed in intellectual pride at the expense of the development of his heart.
2
. .
>..
Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 44.
3
Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York:
William Sloane, 1949), p. 139.
4
. .
,
.
A. N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and
Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1963), p. 161.
3
02
Also showing man's willful destruction of himself is Poe's "William Wilson."
A. H. Quinn calls this
story "the tragic consequences of a separation of moral
5
and physical identity. •' By the end of the story, the
physical and spiritual aspects of Wilson have become so
far separated that one can exist only at the expense of
the other.
Wilson, as a being, destroys himself.
Poe
seems to be exhorting a balance between the spiritual and
physical aspects of man and implying that when the moral
or spiritual side, the conscience, is ignored, destruction
will result.
In the other Poe story, "The Assignation,"
the •'Byronic Hero," unable to live without his love, kills
himself.
nant.
Again the weakness of the character is predomi-
Poe's purpose in this story must be his usual one
of creating a single effect of suspense and horror.
Due
to the extravagant melodramatics of the tale, however,
the effect Poe achieves is almost ludricrous to the modern
reader.
In "Noon Wine" the author also makes the character
of Thompson largely responsible for his own destruction.
Society plays a part in his downfall by its condemnation
of Thompson's unintentional killing, but it is primarily
Thompson's lack of inner strength that prefigures his doom,
5
A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), p. 286.
03
His weaknesses are stressed early in the story in his inability to manage the farm, his ineffective disciplining
of his children, and his innate laziness.
Thompson is a
sympathetic character but one in whom a tragic flaw is
easily discernible.
Among those stories assigning the major responsibility for the suicides to other characters are "Flowering Judas," "Clytie," "The River," "The Lame Shall Enter
First, •• and "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger. ••
In •'Flowering Judas" the characters of both Braggioni and
Laura are responsible for Eugenie's death—Braggioni's
corruptness and lack of true devotion to the revolutionary cause and Laura's inability to feel and express natural human emotions.
Miss Porter's main purpose in this
story seems to be pointing out the dangers of isolation
from mankind, as exemplified by the character of Laura,
who, by her aloofness, has cut off any meaningful relationship with others and thereby has become spiritually
barren and emotionally dead.
It is this same involvement
with mankind for which Clytie searches so frantically and
fruitlessly throughout her pitiful life.
The members of
Clytie's family are largely responsible for her destruction since they, warped and isolated from society themselves, have denied Clytie the opportunity of meaningful
human relationships.
Ruth M. Vande Kieft has pointed out
that Miss Welty's stories are largely concerned with "the
84
mysteries of inner life . . . with what is secret, concealed, inviolable in any human being, resulting in dis6
tance or separation between human beings."
Robert Penn
Warren has observed that the theme of isolation is central
in Miss Welty's fiction.
In the character of Clytie,
Miss Welty shows vividly the isolation and yearning for
love in the human heart.
Clytie, so aware of the possible
wonder and beauty of the world around her, meets nothing
but denial and brutality.
Miss Welty uses Clytie's sui-
cide to show what such isolation from love wreaks—the
destruction of the soul—and to epitomize the utter failure of Clytie to escape into a world of love and meaning.
The child's yearning in "The River" is similar to
Clytie's, a yearning for meaningful relationships, both
physical and spiritual.
Neglectful and indifferent par-
ents are largely to blame for the child's final act of
suicide.
Miss O'Connor stresses in this story the spiri-
tual dearth of the modern world, symbolized in the story
by parents concerned only with themselves and with no time
or affection for the small child.
This same theme per-
meates "The Lame Shall Enter First,'^ in which Miss O'Connor
Ruth Vande Kieft, "The Mysteries of Eudora Welty,"
Georgia Review, XV (1961), p. 345.
7
Robert Penn Warren, "Irony with a Center:
Katherine Anne Porter," Kenyon Review, IV (1942), p. 250.
85
uses the suicide of Norton to illustrate the death of the
"innocents'^ of this world and the destruction of religious
faith.
Even though she is censuring a secular society,
she uses the character of Sheppard to symbolize this society and places the responsibility for the child's suicide on the father's shoulders.
Norton, ready to accept
God, is denied the opportunity through lack of knowledge
and by his secular environment in which his father denies
all existence of God.
The sacrifice of an innocent child
is harsh and the hanging grotesque in this story, but Flannery O'Connor, speaking as a Christian writer, explained
that this is often the only way to speak to a secular
world.
In an essay explaining her use of the grotesque
and ugly she says,
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in
modern life distortions which are repugnant to him,
and his problem will be to make these appear as
distortions to an audience which is used to seeing
them as natural; and he may well be forced to take
ever more violent means to get his vision across
to this hostile audience.°
Explaining elsewhere in this essay that she always looks
out from "the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy•' and that
for her "the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption
9
by Christ," Miss O'Connor makes clear that it is impossible
Q
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), p. 52.
^Ibid., p. 54.
86
to view any of her work out of the Christian context from
which she writes.
Clearly, in "The Lame Shall Enter First"
her foremost condemnation is reserved for Sheppard in his
disbelief.
The death of the child through Sheppard's con-
cern, therefore, becomes her picture of what intellectual
pride can do to God's grace and salvation.
In "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger,"
York's shallow and superficial wife is largely to blame
for his death.
Her lack of understanding greatly con-
tributes to his suicide.
In the sympathetic character of
Jeff York, Robert Penn Warren shows the utter despair resulting from York's painfully gained knowledge that his
hard work and sacrifice have not brought the happiness
he dreamed of.
His wife, to whom the good life meant the
"civilized'• way of town and specifically the hamburger
stand, does not share his dream nor his triumph when the
farm is finally his.
His death reflects the terrible
irony of a success which brings about his destruction.
By far the largest number of stories seem to contain some criticism of society, whether this be the immediate environment of the character or society as a whole.
Essentially, an author always gives his view of the universe, his view of life in our society, and many times he
blames this society for the ills which befall the human
beings at its mercy.
87
Ambrose Bierce was such an author.
Stuart C.
Woodruff has remarked the significant regularity with
which suicide is used in Bierce's stories.
To him, sui-
cide illuminated the heart of Bierce's "vision of the human race, trapped and betrayed in the wilderness of the
world."
Indeed, Bierce's viev/ of the world was dark, and
all of his stories illustrate this darkened vision.
He
was influenced by determinism and very sensitive to the
"vast impersonal forces in nature which reduced man to
the status of a puppet jerked by the strings of chance."
This belief resulted in a persistent theme running through
his work:
fate.
man's helplessness in the face of an inevitable
Since Bierce so often shows the bitter contrast be-
tween a character's aspirations and the harsh reality,
especially in war, that reduces man to an almost animal
level and makes existence meaningless, death becomes a
symbol of "life's final inanity."
Tlius suicide becomes
man's final desperate gesture against the forces that control his fate.
As Danforth Ross points out, most naturalistic
writers sought in their stories to show "that man is not
•'-^Stuart C. Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose
Bierce: A Study in Polarity (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1964), pp. 30, 19.
Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce,
p. 32.
88
merely influenced by environmental or hereditary forces
12
but is determined by them."
This attitude is clearly
shown in several stories of this study.
In Dreiser's
"Typhoon" Ida is never condemned for her actions; indeed
she never seems to ask herself if she has done wrong.
She is shown as a victim of circumstances—her strict upbringing and the moral strictures of a puritanical society
As Ray B. West states, according to Dreiser, Ida Zobel is
•'the result of a home environment which has withheld her
from life, so that when she faces its risks and is betrayed, it is the society which has provided such an en13
vironment which is to blame."
Her suicide is almost in-
evitable, according to such a concept.
Dreiser omits any
sense of individual responsibility in his story.
Society,
according to Dreiser, is responsible for Ida's suicide,
because it has given her a false set of values and ideals
with which to face the harsh realities of life. In
Dreiser's other story, "The Lost Phoebe," there is also
social commentary in the portrayal of the drab conditions
of the farm, perhaps implying why the children left and
felt no close ties with their family because of this drab
environment.
Old Henry's misfortune also is the result
of a physical force—his senility.
The lack of
12
Ross, The American Short Story, p. 25.
13
^Ray B. West, The Short Story m America, Second
Edition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), p. 38.
PQ
understanding from society contributes to his degeneration
and his suicide.
Sherwood TVnderson, influenced by naturalism and
always concerned with the conflict between nature and the
world of power, wealth, and religion, uses the suicide of
May Edgley in "Unused" to portray the victory of that
world over the natural impulses of human beings.14 When
May's attempt to communicate a part of her longing to another human being is so mistaken, by both the young man
and the village society, her frustration is complete.
Suicide seems the only answer to her sense of life's futility.
Anderson's condemnation of a society's moral con-
ventions is graphically illustrated by May's suicide.
Hazel Morse in "Big Blonde"' is also trapped by her
environment.
Dorothy Parker shows in this story the empti-
ness of the lives of her characters in an environment
consisting solely of drinking, eating, and casual lovemaking.
Hazel, caught in this milieu, prepared for no
other kind of life and not really perceptive enough to
realize that any other sort of life exists, only knows
that her own life is empty, meaningless, and dreary.
Miss
Parker shows Hazel's attempted suicide as the only means
she knows to escape such dreariness.
As Danforth Ross has
l^Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1957), p. 244.
90
observed, there is a naturalistic element in the story in
the "social desert in which the characters live.""^^
Hazel
is doomed to this meaningless existence by the forces of
her environment.
Crane's Maggie also is a victim of circumstances.
Several critics have pointed out that Crane, in inscriptions for the 1893 Maggie, stated,
"For it tries to show
that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and
frequently shapes lives regardless."
Surely at least
one of Crane's purposes in depicting Maggie's destruction
was to point out how the circumstances of her slum existence and brut.al treatment by others pushed Maggie to her
eventual suicide.
As William T. Lenehan says, "Each step
toward suicide seems determined by the characters who
17
represent forces m her society. . . . "
Some critics,
however, suggest that Crane's purpose extends beyond the
simple naturalistic view that man is a victim of
"I cz
Ross, The American Short Story, p. 39.
Joseph X. Brennan, "Ironic and Symbolic Structure in Crane's 'Maggie,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
XVI (1962), p. 315; Max Westbrook, "Stephen Crane's Social
Ethic," American Quarterly, XIV (1962), p. 587; and Larzer Ziff, "Stephen Crane's 'Maggie' and Darwinism,"
American Quarterly, XVI (1964), p. 183.
17 .
William T. Lenehan, "The Failure of Naturalistic
Techniques in Stephen Crane's 'Maggie,'" Stephen Crane's
'Maggie': Text and Context, ed. by Maurice Bassan (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1966), p. 172.
circumstances and has no control over his own destiny.
This larger view is best summed up by Donald Pizer:
The novel is not so much about the slums as
a physical reality as about what people believe
in the slums and how their beliefs are both false
to their experience and yet function as operational
forces in their lives.18
Illustrative of this view is the fact that the people in
Maggie's life accept conventional moral standards even
though they sometimes do not apply to their situations.
These conventions, such as the ideas that the home is a
center of virtue and that respectability is a primary
moral goal, seem strangely out of place in the tenements
of the Bowery.
Maggie's home has been nothing but squa-
lor, drunkenness, and brutality; and she has seen no respectability displayed by her mother.
Yet Maggie's mis-
step brings forth the same response that a conventional
home would supposedly have.
Jimmie sees no connection be-
tween his own immorality and Maggie's fall.
Thus, Maggie
is the victim "not so much of the blind impersonal force
of her environment as of the inadequate morality of the
unreal world view rooted in perverse pride and vanity."
19
18
Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1966), p. 111.
19
James B. Colvert, ••Crane's Image of Man,"
Stephen Crane's 'Maggie'" Text and Context, ed. by Maurice Bassan (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1966), p.
138.
92
All the characters suffer from illusions, usually produced by vanity or pride.
Mary Johnson refuses to see
herself as the brutal alcoholic she is and fancies herself as a righteous mother.
Jiiranie sees his courage as
being of heroic proportions, even though his bluster never
amounts to anything.
Even Maggie has illusions of escap-
ing into a world of romance and glamour.
These illusions
account in part for Maggie's downfall, and when Maggie
realizes that her romantic dream is only illusion, she
is driven to despair and suicide.
Maggie is thus at the
same time Crane's view of the force of environment on
human beings and also his condemnation of the falsity and
destructiveness of certain moral codes—both views illustrated by Maggie's degradation and suicide.
Although Willa Gather treats the character of Paul
in "Paul's Case" with both sympathy and irony, the influence of environment in his destruction is predominant.
The environment which Paul found so intolerable, the commercial and industrial life of a city, was hated also by
Willa Gather.
She is sympathetic toward Paul's love of
beauty at all costs but she also reveals him as a shallow
person, since Paul never thinks "to persevere in the course
20
that would bring him the kind of life he wants. •'
Ross
20 ,
John H. Randall, The Landscape and the Looking
Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 30.
93
suggests that Gather's philosophy behind the story is deterministic and her purpose for Paul's suicide could very
well reflect this determinism.
His suicide seems to be
both a symbol of his defeat by the forces of an intolerant
society and his final gesture of defiance against such
society.
In the introduction to Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton,
referring to her story, writes:
. . . for I had felt . . . that the theme of
my tale was not one on which many variations could
be played. It must be treated as starkly and summarily as life had always presented itself to my
protagonists; any attempt to elaborate and complicate their sentiments would necessarily have
falsified the whole. They were, in truth, these
figures, my granite outcroppings; but halfemerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate. 22
This close alliance of her characters and their environment surely at least points to Mrs. Wharton's purpose in
Ethan Frome.
Although at least two critics have considered
Ethan a weak, passive man who does "nothing by moral elec23
24
tion"
and expresses a "negation of life, •' there seems
21
Ross, The American Short Story, p. 29.
22
Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. vi.
23
Lionel Trilling, "The Morality of Inertia,'•
Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 143.
24
Kenneth Bernard, "Imagery and Symbolism in
•Ethan Frome,'" College English, XXIII (1961), p. 183.
94
more support in the story itself for the view of Ethan as
a character of promising, even heroic possibilities.
The
impression Frome makes on the narrator from the beginning
of the story suggests an admirable character.
His very
appearance suggests a ruin, but a majestic ruin.
His
longing to be an engineer and his renewed interest in
scientific reading when the young engineer gives him books
connote a mind, though wasted, which still hungers for
knowledge.
Miss Wharton makes clear that Ethan "had al-
ways been more sensitive than the people about him to the
25
appeal of natural beauty."
Thus Ethan emerges as a
strong, sensitive man doomed by circumstances beyond his
control.
And, as Blake Nevius points out, even though
Ethan is hemmed in by circumstances', it is Ethan's own
sense of responsibility "that blocks the last avenue of
escape and condemns him to a life of sterile expiation.'•
26
Ethan's sense of duty prevents him from running away from
Zeena, just as years before, it had prevented him from
forsaking his parents.
His self-sacrifice adds up to a
waste, however, and when he tries to escape this futile
waste.
25
Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 33.
^^Blake Nevius, "On 'Ethan Frome,'" Edith Wharton
p^ Collection of Critical Essays, p. 132.
95
His very attempt to escape through suicide,
in fact, had only doubled the bonds of his captivity; for his crippled body only objectifies
the warped state of his soul, now chained to the
ruins of a tragic marriage and even more tragic
love.^^
Thus, Mrs. Wharton uses the attempted suicide and its failure to illustrate starkly and poignantly the warping of
Ethan Frome, both in body and soul, a warping largely accomplished by the circumstances in which Ethan lives.
Two overly sentimental stories in this study also
blame environment and society at least partially for the
suicides of their victims.
0. Henry uses his double sui-
cide in "The Furnished Room" supposedly to show the irony
of fate and the cruel heartlessness of an uncaring world,
possibly represented by the slovenly landlady, her dreary
roominghouse, and her conniving unconcern for the misery
28
of the young man.
The suicides of both the young girl
and the boy seem to show what happens to youth and innocence in the "monstrous quicksand" and "ooze and slime'•
of a large city.
Due to the excessive sentimentalism and
the sometimes maudlin tone, 0. Henry falls short of achieving his purpose.
Although not as sentimental as 0. Henry's
story, Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" contains
^"^Joseph X. Brennan, "'Ethan Frome': Structure
and Metaphor, •• Modern Fiction Studies, VII (1961), p. 355.
28
Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction, p. 97.
96
many melodramatic effects.
Bret Harte ostensibly shows
the basic virtue in human nature, especially the sterling
qualities of characters often considered immoral by society.
His two suicides in this story illustrate this
theme.
Mother Shipton's self-sacrifice shows a sudden
and unrealistic conversion of her character.
Her motiva-
tion supposedly is solely for the prolongation of the
lives of the two young innocents.
John Oakhurst, selfless
in his leadership, commits suicide only after he has done
all he can do for the others and when he realizes their
plight is hopeless.
The excessive sentimentality of the
story and lack of credible motivation of characters destroy much of the effectiveness of the theme Bret Harte is
stressing.
Melville's purpose in portraying Bartleby's suicide is as ambiguous as Bartleby's motive in committing
suicide.
The two are inextricably intertwined.
Melville's
view of society and the universe, however, was a pessimistic one at the time he wrote "Bartleby."
Such previous
works as Moby Dick, Pierre, and "Benito Cereno" furnish
partial clues as to the significance of Bartleby's defiance
of our defeat by life.
In these works, Melville views life
more or less as futile and meaningless.
Therefore, it
seems logical to consider Bartleby within this same context.
Bartleby's death seems to signify a belief in the
97
sterility of life, an awful void, represented in the story
by the terrible blank walls of nothingness at which Bartleby stares until he eventually withdraws altogether into
death.
In "Indian Camp" Hemingway deals with the themes
running through the stories and sketches of In Our T i m e —
the cycle of life, childbirth, and death—and their recognition by the young protagonist, Nick Adams.
The suicide
in this story serves as a part of Nick's initiation into
life and its harshness, as it shows the violence, horror,
and unpredictability of death—and the irony that it is
the young Indian husband who dies, not his wife who has
been at the point of death in child labor for two days.
As Philip Young points out, this story begins a pattern
of evil and violence for Nick that is developed in the
29
rest of the Nick Adams stories.
Certainly the suicide
forms a part of that pattern of evil and violence.
Ross
suggests that Hemingway's stories test "man's spiritual
30
existence against the trapping forces"
of an indifferent
universe.
In "Indian Camp" the suicide serves the purpose
of showing that some, such as the Indian, cannot cope with
these forces and are crushed by them; but others, like
29
Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway, p. 32.
30
_
Ross, The American Short Story, p. 34.
98
Nick, are influenced by them but not defeated.
A criticism of society is at least implied in
"Daddy Deering" when the society to which Daddy Deering
has given so much of his time and energy finally ridicules,
ignores, and eventually scorns him.
Also in this story,
however, Hamlin Garland shows a fate worse than death when
the old man, who had gloried in his great strength and endurance, becomes wasted and useless in body.
Daddy's
death comes as a welcome release from a life made meaningless by his dwindled and crippled form.
The tragedy of
Daddy is not that he dies but that he could not die before
he was so far past his prime.
In "The Burning," "Old Mortality," and "A Perfect
Day for Bananafish," the authors are censuring certain
types of societies.
In "The Burning" Miss Welty shows the
death of Southern aristocracy in the hangings of Miss Theo
and Miss Myra.
They epitomize Southern gentility, brutal-
ized and humiliated by the savage actions of the Union
soldiers.
The dignified strength of Miss Theo and the
lady-like gentility of Miss Myra give a composite picture
of what the North destroyed.
Miss Welty's censure seems
to encompass both the North and the South—the North for
its brutal savagery, the South for its impractical concept
of genteel womanhood.
The romanticism of the South is
also criticized in "Old Mortality. •' Although the suicide
of Amy is buried in the past and no clear-cut explanation
99
can be given, some details indicate that society is largely
to blame for Amy's death.
Amy's short life is spent in
rebellion against this society and its values—her escapade to Mexico, her defiance of her father in matters of
dress, her disregard for her own health.
Her dissatisfac-
tion with and defiance of the acceptable standards for
Southern belles find a final rebellion by her suicide.
Salinger, in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is
criticizing another type of society, the modern materialistic world.
Although motivation for Seymour's suicide
is vague in the story, condemnation of Muriel, her mother,
and their values reflects Salinger's strictures on a materialistic society which allows no place in its scheme
for idealistic dreamers like Seymour.
Such a world's total
lack of understanding and sympathy for those individuals
who do not conform to its superficial values and concerns
is responsible for the destruction of such individuals as
Seymour.
In conclusion, man's character in relation to his
surroundings and his relationships with other human beings were to sum up his life.
For the authors in this
study, this summation is often tragic, desperate, and hopeless.
As Frank O'Connor has pointed out in The Lonely
Voice, " . . . there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the n o v e l —
f
100
an intense awareness of human loneliness.""^'''
It is this
terrible •'human loneliness" these authors have shown in
their studies of self-destruction.
31
, ,
Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of
the Short Story (Cleveland: World Publishing Company,
1962), p. 19.
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