The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Barbara C. Gannon (essay date 1982)
Barbara C. Gannon (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café," in The Explicator, Vol. 41, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 59-60.
[In the following essay, Gannon argues that the final paragraph in The Ballad of the Sad Café—in which the chain gang from the beginning of the novella reappears—"recounts, in the manner of an envoy, the whole ballad. "]
Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café is bracketed with the observation that the town is dreary. The narrator suggests in the introduction and again in the closing lines that one listen to the chain gang, presumably for diversion. But in the introduction the gang's appearance is a promise; in the final paragraph the gang actually recounts, in the manner of an envoy, the whole ballad. The envoy sketches successive concepts of an empty or fallow time, a time of incipience, increase, crest, and a relapse and return to greater emptiness. The overall...
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