The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Dawson F. Gaillard (essay date 1972)
Dawson F. Gaillard (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: "The Presence of the Narrator in Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café," in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXV, Fall, 1972, pp. 419-27.
[In the following essay, Gaillard argues that it is through the consciousness of the narrator in The Ballad of the Sad Café that the reader experiences the mythic qualities of the depicted characters and events.]
The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize
Acceptance Speech.
A voice speaks to us in the first paragraph of Carson McCullers'The Ballad of the Sad Café, a flat, inflectionless voice, adjusted to the dreariness it describes as we go on a walking tour with the speaker to the center of town. There, we find an old house leaning dangerously near collapse....
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