"No Door"
In the extended short story—or perhaps novella—“No Door” one of the main characters is a millionaire who fantasizes about the simplicity of being poor, but doesn’t want to actually be poor. Wolfe describes his character in one robust paragraph, only half of which is quoted below:
“Indeed, he is a most aesthetic-looking millionaire, his features, although large and generous, are full of sensitive intelligence, his manners are gentle, quietly subdued, his smile a little sad, touched faintly with a whimsy of ironic humor, as of one who has passed through all the anguish, hope, and tortured fury youth can know”
"The Hollow Men"
At the other end of the spectrum, far away from the millionaire poseur is poor Mr. C. Green, who “lies disjected and exploded on a street in Brooklyn.”
“He was no voyager of unknown seas, no pioneer of western trails. He was life’s little man, life’s nameless cipher, life’s manswarm atom, life’s American”
"The Birthday"
Just a casual skimming of the stories of Wolfe is all that is necessary to realize he does not belong to that group of writers known as “minimalists.” He is especially loquacious when dealing with metaphor; taking prose into a realm quite close to poetry:
“There was an ache of bitter, nameless joy and sorrow in him as he looked at her: the immortal light of time and of the universe fell upon her, and the feet swarmed past upon the pavements of the street, and the old hunger for the wand and the key pierced to his entrails—for he believed the magic word might come to unlock his heart and say all that he felt as he saw Esther there at noon in bright October.”
"The Return of the Prodigal"
Don’t get the impression that Wolfe expended all his powers of metaphorical construction on character description. He is also more than able to invest inanimate objects with a living quality:
“The gaunt and many-gabled structures, beaten and swept by the cold rain, seemed to sag and to be warped by age and disrepair, and to confer there dismally like a congress of old crones in the bleak nakedness of night and storm that surrounded them.”
Wolfe's Panorama
Some writers discover a metaphorical image that just really gets to them and it becomes as much as part of the toolbox they bring to work every day as ink and paper. For Thomas Wolfe, that image was a panorama; usually one so oversized its girth demanded to be described. The metaphor shows up across the breath of Wolfe’s work: it can be found in his novels, his plays and not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions in his short story, “Boom Town.”
“A gigantic panorama of a continent gasping for its breath unfolded as the train rushed on”
“as lovely and magical a landscape as the earth can offer—the vast panorama of the ranges of the `Smokies’”
“the desolate and barren panorama of their ruin would not be clearly known to them for several years to come.”
