The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Todd Stabbins (essay date 1988)
Todd Stabbins (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café," in The Explicator, Vol. 46, No. 2, Winter, 1988, pp. 36-8.
[In the following essay, Stebbins briefly discusses the final section of The Ballad of the Sad Café, arguing that this "coda" demonstrates the harmony that is possible, however temporarily, between human beings.]
In The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers shows us a carefully crafted world where people struggle to escape the isolation that oppresses each of them. The Ballad's famous love passage predicts that each person will use love for another as his or her means of escape. McCullers' skillful use of settings—the town, the cafe with its upper rooms, the ventures away from the cafe—further the theme of isolation and this quest for love. Everything in The Ballad, save the key final scene in which McCullers offers a note of hope, centers around the cafe....
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