The Narrators
The author is quite upfront about the intended symbolism of the narrators of the tales in this collection. He explicitly identifies their symbolic status in the Preface when he asserts that each of them, collective, are portraits of torment. That is to say, they are representatives of the universal condition of being stymied in their intentions, whether that is intention is do something good, something evil, or even to do absolutely nothing at all. It’s a great big world out there and no intention is so insignificant that one can’t become tormented by virtue of it being circumvented.
Bloomington
The titular city which is the primary setting of all the stories in this collection is an almost unbearably stereotypical symbol of the idea of an average town in Middle America. The stories written composed by an Indonesian writer who temporarily called it home. The result are stories that bear no obvious vestiges of the writer’s native culture nor any uniquely and idiosyncratic signs that force its stories to take place only in this particular town. Not only could the stories have been set just about anywhere else in America, but one gets the feeling that they could also easily be transferred to a similarly populated location in Indonesia. Bloomington thus becomes a symbol for any community where humans congregate.
Watching
The first-person narrators of these stories are almost all voyeurs to one degree or another. They may be the central character in the story itself, but in their telling of them they are usually not the main point of interest. All of them are observers of others whose actual engagement in social discourse is carried out with a certain amount of isolation and alienation from those who are being observed. They are really active participants in any dramatic conflict and those that do participate in some way are still presenting themselves as detached outsiders. The symbolism here is integrally related to the Bloomington connection to strong suggest that the average person lives their life more as observer than proactive participant.
Poetry
References pop up to poetry an awful lot in this book seemingly about stereotypical residents of a Middle America. Which is not exactly a conceptual space notably associated with such precious artistic expression. In fact, the word poetry appears about twenty-five times more often than the word “football” which absolutely doesn’t sound quite right considering the locale. This divergence in indicative of the intrusion of the author’s consciousness into his stories of American alienation. One of the stories entirely revolves around poetry while the other references specifically point to attempts made to connect on a level higher than the more concrete interactions which provoke argument and conflict. Poetry is thus a symbol of the power of art to transcend the torments of obstruction and even, perhaps, become a means of achieving immortal contentment.
Places
Most stories dedicate chunks of description prose to the places in which the story is set. This collection takes that typicality almost to extremes. The very opening lines of the very first story is a description of the street on which the story is set. “The Family M” opens with the narrator informing the reader about how long he has lived “in this giant building containing two hundred apartment.” Likewise, “At first Grant Street caught my attention because it was brick and not asphalt” is the first information the narrator of “Yorrick” deems important to share. The persistent insistence by the narrators to begin their stories by making a link between place and character indicates a highly symbolic status be accorded to the significance of the place one calls home. After all, lest one forget, the characters in the title are referred to far more vaguely than the place they call home.
