Essay Questions

What’s the deal in “Blackberry Winter” with the stranger and the narrator?

Like most of the author’s short stories, this one is not about the mechanics of plot and storytelling. It actually used to rank quite high among the most anthologized American short stories of all time and, somewhat paradoxically, began to fall out of favor just around the time one might think it would actually rise in critical value. As a rejection of old-fashioned short fiction storytelling, it really does belong more in the world of postmodern stories about the ambiguity of the darkness of the modern world. It is essentially a story of a bunch of bad things happening in a small town that coincides with a mysterious stranger who draws the fascination of the young narrator. The publication date of the story really says everything: 1946, the year after World War II ended as well as the year that the full extent of Nazi atrocities were finally beginning to flood the modern consciousness. After all, what the deal of this story is has everything to do with opening one’s eyes to the darkness which pervades human existence.

Which unlikely character in this collection is actually based on a real person?

In addition to the baseball player in “Goodwood Comes Back” there is another major character whose even stranger tale is stepped in historical fact. Bolton Lovehart, the mama’s boy who builds the titular circus in his attic, is based to not insignificant degree upon John Wesley Venable, Jr. Born in 1888, Venable lived with his mother—like his fictional counterpart—until her death half a century later. During that time, John Wesley began to build his own circus using everyday items. For instance, a calliope was constructed from tubes of lipstick while bottle caps were quite effective representations of the wheels on a train. It has been suggested that Warren became aware of the circus while visiting the town where Venable’s creation was quite well known, Hopkinsville, KY, at some point in the 1930’s.

How does the opening paragraph of “When the Light Gets Green” demonstrate what is a recurring theme throughout the collection?

Most of the stories in this collection of short fiction are structured as recollection, either explicitly as first-person narratives or through a third-person perspective that feels as though it was told in the first-person. The reason that those third-person perspectives gain the more immediate feel of a personal account is because tales being told are conveyed through a distinct memory and that memory is often hazy or unreliable or otherwise ambiguous. This aspect of storytelling is at the forefront of the how the story is told because it will inevitably become significant to what is being told. Thus, the reader is often forced to parse the actual storytelling to make sure what is being recalled is actually trustworthy. Nowhere is this element of the storytelling approach more explicitly demonstrated than in the opening of “When the Light Gets Green” in which the firs-person narrator writes: “My grandfather had a long white beard and sat under the cedar tree. The beard, as a matter of fact, was not very long and not white, only gray”