The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Albert J. Griffith (essay date 1967)
Albert J. Griffith (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: "Carson McCullers' Myth of the Sad Café," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 46-56.
[In the following essay, Griffith examines the ways in which McCullers imbues The Ballad of the Sad Café with mythic elements.]
Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café is as grotesque in characterization and incident as anything in American literature. The simple summarizing of the situation reveals its perverseness: a dark, masculine, cross-eyed giant of a woman develops strange, possessive love for a dirty, mischievous, hunchbacked dwarf of a man, who in turn worships a handsome, guitar-strumming robber and seducer, who in his turn had previously so desired the giant woman that he had contracted a miserable ten-day unconsummated marriage with her.
Yet the quality of the novella most frequently cited by critics is the mysterious beauty which encompasses...
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