The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Margaret B. McDowell (essay date 1980)
Margaret B. McDowell (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "The Ballad of the Sad Café, " in Carson McCullers, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 65-79.
[In the following excerpt, McDowell provides an overview of The Ballad of the Sad Café, addressing topics such as the novella's combination of comic and tragic elements, the relation between the story and McCullers's personal life, and its mythical, Gothic, and ballad-like features.]
In The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers achieved an intricate blending of the real and the mythic, of the comic and the desolate, and of the provincial and the universal. She attained in this short novel an extraordinary compression, control, objectivity, and sense of proportion. The narrative voice speaks at times in archaic diction and at times in a tone of leisured elegance; at still other times, in a pithy colloquial idiom. Though the three principal characters are grotesques, rather than...
[The entire page is 6069 words long]
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