The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Richard Gray (essay date 1977)
Richard Gray (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Moods and Absences," in Carson McCullers, Chelsea House Publishers 1986, pp. 77-85.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1977, Gray argues that the sense of isolation that permeates McCullers's fiction—which he claims has often been commented upon but never satisfactorily accounted for—is attributable to her having produced most of her fiction in a transitory period between the "renaissance" in Southern fiction and its "new wave, " as well as to specifics of her childhood. He further states that The Ballad of the Sad Café exemplifies the ways in which McCullers created a new kind of fiction, one cut off from recognizable tradition, out of what was familiar to her.]
There is a peculiar quality of isolation about Carson McCullers's work, frequently remarked upon but never properly explained, that owes some of its intensity perhaps to her own status vis-à-vis the...
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