8/29/13

   I am only seven pages in of Winesburg, Ohio, and I am already in love with the book.  I find it to be mysterious, and I think that it holds an abundance of deeper meaning that can be interpreted in any way the reader wants to interpret it.  Today in class, we were not even able to finish the first story which is only five pages long because we went into great detail as to what we thought the text was trying to say.  There is no space to write anything else in the margins of those five pages because they are filled with my own interpretations as well as different interpretations that my classmates came up with that I did not think about. 
   One of the interesting aspects of the book that I have noticed so far is the repeating of certain words.  While reading the "The Book of the Grotesque" in class today, I circled the words: window, bed, and woman.  These three words are mentioned quite often in ONLY  the first five pages.  I wonder how many more times they will be repeated throughout the book. 
   The one word that I circled the most was the word bed.  The bed seems to be the old writer's sanctuary.  He calls a carpenter and asks him to raise the bed so that he can look outside the window. Since he wants the bed, his sanctuary, to be raised higher, it seems like he wants to be closer to the heavens.  He knows that he is soon going to die, and he wants to be able to see the beauty outside of the window before he goes.  After seeing the grotesques passing before his eyes, he gets out of bed to write after seeing a certain grotesque.  The narrator presence states, "Although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write," (Sherwood 5).  This indicates that the grotesque he saw had enough influence to urge the man to get out of his sanctuary and write.  This grotesque had the power to take the old write out of his safe haven, so that he could write down the truths of the grotesques.
   Another aspect of the first story or chapter is that the narrator is unknown.  Who is the mysterious identity narrating the old writer's story?  When beginning the story, the reader does not know that the story is in first person.  I could not tell that it was being written from the first person perspective when I began reading it.  All of a sudden, the word I is presented, and the reader realizes that there is some sort of narrator telling the old writer's story.  The narrator seems to be a presence.  The narrator does not seem to be any certain human in the story or relating to the story.  The narrator seems to be just a presence who wants to tell the story of the old writer.
   I am looking forward to reading further into the novel.  I enjoyed finding the deeper meaning of the first story, so I cannot wait to see what the rest of the stories are like and find out what they mean.