The Paperhanger (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Gay
- First Published: 2000
- Type of Plot: Realism
- Time of Work: The 1990's
- Setting: East Tennessee
- Principal Characters: Dr. Jamahl, His wife, Zeineb, Bellwether, The paperhanger
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Parents and children, Murder or homicide, South or Southerners, Twentieth century, 1920’s, Immigration or emigration, Violence, Tennessee, Kidnapping, Materialism, Houses, mansions, or manors, Pakistan or Pakistanis, Construction or construction workers, Evil
- Locales: Tennessee
The Story
“The Paperhanger” is a dark tale of the disappearance of a child, the resultant disintegration first of her parents’ marriage and then of their lives, and of a shocking miracle engineered by the paperhanger, a strange dispassionate man. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who unfolds his yarn with consummate skill and a portentousness that vacillates between grim, almost biblical, wisdom and brutal irony.
The narrative opens with the assertion that the vanishing of the child “was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then...
[The entire page is 1751 words long]
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