nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world,
inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk
and to whom he explained the things he had been unable
to explain to living people."

In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon
one of the great themes of American literature,
especially Midwestern literature, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle
for speech as it entails a search for the self. Perhaps
the central Winesburg story, tracing the basic
movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in which the
old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office close by a
window that was covered with cobwebs," writes down some
thoughts on slips of paper ("pyramids of truth," he
calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where
they "become round hard balls" soon to be discarded.
What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know;
Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old
man they are utterly precious and thereby
incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral
signature.

After a time the attentive reader will notice in these
stories a recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the
grotesques, gathering up a little courage, venture out
into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark, there
to establish some initiatory relationship with George
Willard, the young reporter who hasn't yet lived long
enough to become a grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or