y/:Jt.<...-^--- '--^^

SUICIDE IN THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

by

MARGARET WATKINS, B.S. in Ed.

A THESIS

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Approved

Accepted

December, 1970

T3 1970 No, 191 CLop. 2

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to thank Dr. Warren Walker for his untiring aid in the preparation of this thesis.

11

fi-.> 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

P a g e

ACKNOWLEDGMENT ii

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION I

II. CAUSES OF SUICIDE 8

III. EFFECTS OF THE SUICIDES ON SURVIVORS . . 67

IV. THE AUTHORS' PURPOSES IN USING THE SUICIDE THEME 78

BIBLIOGRAPHY 101

111

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Each year between 18,000 and 20,000 persons in the

United States carry out the irrevocable and awful decision

to end their own lives. Approximately six times that many

people try and fail. These figures are extremely con­

servative because of social pressures against certification

of death as suicidal. Statistics for attempted suicides

are even more conservative, because often these cases are

not reported at all. Clearly, however, suicide is a major

health problem in our country and is among the first ten

causes of death in the United States.

Norman Farberow and Edwin Shneiciman, in their

thorough study of suicide, point out that society assumes

various attitudes toward suicide, "ranging from complete

condemnation through mild disapproval to acceptance and

2

incorporation as one of the mores of communal life." In

the Japanese culture, harikiri was held in high esteem for

centuries; the kamikaze pilots of World War II were na­

tional heroes. Ancient Greeks and Romans often sought

suicide as an honorable end to dishonor of some sort or

Norman L. Farberow and Edwin S. Shneiciman, eds.. The Cry for Help (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 4.

^Ibid., p. 3.

fl

even as a noble sacrifice. In contrast to this view of

suicide, the Catholic Church considers it a mortal sin and

3

British law considers suicide a crime. In our own coun­

try, the attitude toward self-destruction is usually one

of condemnation. Actually, most people view suicide with

a strange mixture of revulsion and fascination. These

mixed feelings have produced almost a taboo on a serious

discussion of suicide. As Dr. Karl Menninger points out

in the foreword to Clues to Suicide, although suicide is

responsible for an alarming number of deaths, there has

never been a widespread campaign against it as there has

4

been against less preventable deaths. Indeed, only re­

cently, largely through the efforts of Farberow and Shneid-

man and their colleagues, have any real advances in sui­

cide prevention been made. Even in our modern society,

there is a stigma attached to suicide which makes it re­

pugnant to the average person.

Even so, the paradoxical aspect of self-destruc­

tion, that man uses his power and intelligence to destroy

that same power and intelligence, has fascinated some of

our greatest writers. Albert Camus, in his philosophical

work, "The Myth of Sisyphus," calls suicide the "one truly

Farberovj Cry for Help, p. 237.

E. S. Shneidman and N. L. Farberow, eds.. Clues to Suicide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. v.

philosophical problem." In the preface to this work, Camus

states his purpose as "an attempt to resolve the problem

of suicide." Camus, an existentialist, taking as his

starting point that the world of reality is "absurd," dis­

cusses suicide as a serious answer to the problem. He op­

poses suicide, however, and offers his own answer to the

absurdity, namely, that a man can find "freedom" in scorn­

ing the world even while he lives in it.

At least one American writer would have disagreed

strenuously with Camus' argument. Ambrose Bierce, in his

essay "Taking Oneself Off," emphatically defended man's

right to take, his own life. Suicide to Bierce indicates

not cowardice, but great courage. He suggests that so­

ciety's condemnation of suicide stems from this knowledge

when he says, "The notion that we have not the right to

take our own lives comes of our consciousness that we have 6

not the courage." He concludes that suicide would occur

more frequently if people were not so cowardly as "to live 7

on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue." Amonc

those justified in removing themselves, he includes those

5 Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus," The Myth

of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans, by Justin O'Brien (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 3, v.

Ambrose Bierce, "Taking Oneself Off," The Col­lected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Neale Publishinc Company, 1912), p. 339.

7 Bierce, "Taking Oneself Off," p. 340.

!J I

suffering incurable disease, those who are heavy burdens

to their friends, those threatened with insanity, those

addicted to drunkenness or any destructive habit, those

without friends, property, employment, or hope, and those

who have disgraced themselves.

Bierce is not alone among American writers con­

cerned with and often sympathetic to suicide. In the field

of the short story, suicide has concerned writers since the

beginning of that genre in America. The purpose of this

study is to find American short stories involving suicide,

to seek the causes and effects of the suicides revealed

in the stories, and to try to ascertain the authors' pur­

poses in portraying the suicides. The criteria for the

selection of stories were two: (1) " that they include an

actual or potential suicide, and (2) that they be of suf­

ficient literary merit to be interpreted in scholarly books

or journals. An initial list of stories was suggested by

the thesis director. Dr. Warren S. Walker, but the list

grew as a result of reading and research. The final canon

of works includes the following thirty-two stories:

Anderson, Sherwood Bierce, Ambrose

Gather, Willa Crane, Stephen Dreiser, Theodore

'Unused" 'George Thurston" •Killed at Resaca" 'The Mockingbird" 'One Officer, One Man" 'One of the Missing" 'The Story of Conscience" 'A Tough Tussle" •Paul's Case" 'Maggie" 'The Lost Phoebe'^

I

Dreiser, Theodore Fitzgerald, F. Scott Garland, Hamlin Harte, Bret

Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hemingway, Ernest Melville, Herman O'Connor, Flannery

O. Henry Parker, Dorothy Poe, Edgar Allan

Porter, Katherine Anne

Salinger, J. D.

Warren, Robert Penn

Welty, Eudora

Wharton, Edith

Typhoon" May Day" Daddy Deering" The Outcasts of Poker

Flat" Ethan Brand" Indian Camp" Bartleby the Scrivener" The Lame Shall Enter

First" The River" The Furnished Room" Big Blonde" The Assignation" William Wilson" Flowering Judas" Noon Wine" Old Mortality" A Perfect Day for

Bananafish" The Patented Gate and

the Mean Hamburger" Clytie" The Burning" Ethan Frome"

These short stories in general involved no major

textual problems, with the exception of Stephen Crane's

"Maggie." The Crane text edited by Thomas A. Gullason was

used, a text which is based on the 1896 American edition

and includes an appendix showing the variant readings from

the 1893 "Maggie." For all the other stories, the most

accessible short story collections or anthologies were

used. Its appearance in Walker's Twentieth-Century Short

8

Story Explication determined whether a story had re­

flected sufficient literary merit to be interpreted by

o Warren S. Walker, Twentieth-Century Short Story

Explication, Second Edition (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1967), passim.

J

an authoritative source. Four short stories were dis­

carded because no interpretations were listed for them.

These stories included "The Success Story" by James Farrell,

"The Murder on Jefferson Street" by Dorothy Canfield Fisher,

"Old Demon" by Pearl Buck, and "A Summer Tragedy" by Arna

Bontemps. All available explications for the other stories

were read and are listed in the bibliography. My apprecia­

tion is due the Inter-Library Loan Service for making

available several explications not in the Texas Tech

Library.

With all respect to the "New Criticism," it would

seem obvious that in this particular area of study, some

historical context would be helpful. Accordingly, after

an intensive reading of the story itself to determine the

cause of suicide, its effect on others, and the author's

presumed purpose in dealing with this theme, there is then

an attempt made to set the story in an historical context,

to view the story as a part of a particular literary period

or movement and as a part of a particular author's work.

Even so, all three of these aspects cannot always be de­

termined for all stories. Although a cause for the suicide

can usually be ascribed and the burden of the blame as­

signed, in many cases the effect of the suicide can only

be inferred, either because of lack of evidence within the

story or simply because the suicide serves as the termina­

tion of the story. Attempting to ascertain any author's

^

real purpose is at best a speculative venture, but for this

study the attempt is essential. For each story, therefore,

an earnest effort is made to determine what the author was

trying to show by his use of suicide, to seek whatever com­

mentary on life and society the author was illustrating

by man's destruction of his own identity.

I

CHAPTER II

CAUSES OF SUICIDE

There are various reasons for the suicides of fic­

tional characters in the American short stories which this

work examines. These causes could be classified in several

different ways, but for the purposes of this study, they

are grouped along lines developed by psychology.

Why do people commit suicide? Before the era of

modern science, explanations sometimes derived from demon-

ology, the belief in a supernatural being who entered the

body and soul ,of the victim, driving him inevitably to 1

suicide. More recently, many psychiatrists have assumed

that anyone committing suicide is at least temporarily in­

sane. The latest studies in this field reveal, however,

that all the dynamics present in self-destructive persons

are also present to some degree in normal persons. Im­

portant dynamics to consider in studying suicide cases are

as follows: depression, especially when coupled with anx­

iety; tension and agitation; hostility and guilt; and de­

pendency needs, particularly if these needs have been 2

frustrated or threatened.

^Arthur L. Kobler and Ezra Stotland, The End of Hope (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), p. 2.

•'Norman D. Tabachink and Norman L. Farberow, "The Assessment of the Self-Destructive Potentiality," The Cry for Help, p. 66.

8

1

Freud attempted to refute the belief that an "ill­

ness" drove a person to suicide when he developed his con­

cept of the conflict within each person of a death instinct

3

and a life instinct. More recently Jungian psychologist

Bruno Klopfer has explained this concept by showing each

ego or self as having both a bright and dark side. When

the dark side predominates, a situation in which death y

seems more desirable or less horrifying than life occurs.

This state> he believes, is a necessary prerequisite for

any suicidal act. Klopfer examines the following as those

situations in which death seems preferable to life. 1. The death of a hero or martyr, in which

situation the life of the individual seems far less important than the preservation of an ideal.

2. Intractable pain or unbearable mental an­guish makes life seem so miserable that death appears largely as a liberation, re­gardless of what expectation a person may have regarding the hereafter.

3. Counterphobic reaction to death is closely related to the situation described above, in which the expectation of death seems so unbearable that the individual prefers an end to horror to a horror without end.

4. Reunion with a dead loved one is sought in cases where the death of a loved one seems to carry with it all the meaning of life. The desire to reunite with this person in death becomes so overwhelming that it does not even matter whether the individual has any concrete notion of how this reunion will take place.

Bruno Klopfer, "Suicide: The Jungian Point of View," The Cry for Help, p. 194.

10

5. The search for freedom, one of the most pe- ^ culiar of these situations, leads to cases of completely unpredictable, almost whimsi­cal acts of suicide, involving the desire not to be committed, not to be tied down, to life or anything it contains.

6. The search for closure, the opposite situa­tion, is an older person's longing for death as a well-deserved closure to a rich and full life.

7. This situation is another aspect of death from the Jungian point of view, namely, longing for spiritual rebirth. This situation rarely comes to the conscious awareness of a person with suicidal tendencies.

As the editors of The End of Hope point out in the

foreword of that book, it is impossible to understand any

individual, or his behavior, without knowing the setting,

the significant aspects of his environment. Since man is

continually in relationship with others around him, these

others exert much influence upon him and his outlook on

life. Suicidal acts are often communications with meaning 5

for the significant other persons involved. Thus, in

this study, in trying to determine the cause of each char­

acter's suicide, an effort was made not only to look within

that character for potential dynamics of suicide, but also

to observe carefully that character's environment, the

other characters close to him and their effect on him, and

the situation which made death seem the desirable end.

Klopfer, pp. 196-197.

^Tabachink and Farberow, p. 68.

11

Klopfer's situations listed above are used as a framework

for this chapter. These situations will be referred to

by the numerical order given by Klopfer.

Situation 1

Illustrating Situation Number 1 described by Klop­

fer is Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who dies a hero's death

in "Killed at Resaca," a Civil War story by Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce describes Brayle in glowing terms as having a

"gentleman's manners, a scholar's head, and a lion's

heart." Always in the foremost ranks in battle, he would

often "stand like a rock in the open when officers and men 7

alike had taken cover."

Of course such foolhardy courage could not endure.

At Resaca, Georgia, his death came, as it was bound to

come, since, as Bierce explains, "he who ignores the law

of probabilities challenges an adversary that is seldom

beaten." During the heat of battle, Brayle, ignoring di­

rections of a safer way, rushes into the open to deliver a

message to the other flank of the army, "a picture to see

. . . erect in the saddle . . . his handsome profile . . .

intensely dramatic" but "equally doomed by friend and

(1 Ambrose Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," The Collected

Works of Ambrose Bierce, II (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1912), p. 94.

7 Ibid., p. 95.

12 8

foe." Brayle is quickly shot from his horse.

A letter found on Brayle's body reveals the cause

of his intrepid courage. His sweetheart had written him

that someone had reported seeing him crouch behind a tree.

Determined to establish his bravery to his loved one,

Brayle succeeds, but heroic death is still, irrevocably,

death.

In Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," the

character of Mother Shipton also falls into the situation

ascribed as the martyr's death. Mother Shipton starves

by denying herself the allotted food rations so that the

"innocent" Pin.ey can survive longer. In a sudden and

hardly credible switch of character, after being thrown

out of Poker Flat because of her low moral character.

Mother Shipton becomes so impressed by the innocent love

of Piney and her fiance'', whom the outcasts encounter in

their journey to the next tovm and with whom they are snow­

bound, that she is willing to sacrifice her own life to

prolong theirs. Bret Harte asks the reader to believe this

nobility is the sole motivation for her suicide, and, as

usual, this sort of sentimentalism asks a great deal of

the reader.

In this same story, the central character of John

Oakhurst also takes his own life in a suicide with

^Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," pp. 98, 99, 100

t)

13

ambivalent motivation. His suicide, although it is an

escape from an impossible situation, also has heroic as­

pects. Even though Oakhurst assumes leadership of the in­

congruous band of stranded outcasts and innocents, over­

seeing the food rations and fashioning snowshoes as a

possible means of obtaining aid, he realizes the futility

of their plight in the snowstorm. His occupation has pre­

pared him for "the percentage in favor of the dealer/' and Q

"He was too much of a gambler not to accept Fate." When

Tom Simpson is to make a journey to seek help, Oakhurst

leaves with him, supposedly to accompany him only to the

canyon and return to camp. When the rescuers from Poker

Flat finally arrive, however, they find John Oakhurst at

the head of the gulch, dead by the derringer by his side.

Of course Oakhurst only precipitated a fate he knew to be

inevitable, but a certain heroism is evident in his heap­

ing a large supply of firewood for the women before he

killed himself, a death which would mean one fewer mouth to

consume the scant supply of food. Perhaps this mixed mo­

tive was partly what Harte meant when he called Oakhurst

". . .at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the

outcasts of Poker Flat."

9 Bret Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat, •' The

Greatest American Short Stories, ed. by A. Grave Day (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 94.

-^^Ibid., p. 104.

\J

14

Situation 2

This situation, in which the character finds him­

self in such unbearable mental anguish that death appears

as a liberation from a life which has become miserable,

accounts for the great majority of suicides in this study.

Other psychologists have elaborated on this particular

situation. Farber, in his study of suicide, suggests that

^ -, . . II . ,

loss of hope IS the lethal element in suicide. This loss

of hope usually comes when a precipitating cause makes life

more difficult to cope with and closes off any possibility

of improvement. Farber contends that the final act of sui­

cide is basically "a resolution, a movement, perceived as

the only possible one, out of a life situation felt to be 12 unbearable by one . . . with hope extinguished." As

Kobler and Stotland have observed, suicidal attempts are

13 really frantic pleas for help and hope from other people.

In these stories, the characters' cries for help have gone

unheeded.

Hemingway's "Indian Camp" offers the most clear-

cut instance of such a cause. In this story there is de­

picted a young Indian husband who commits suicide while

Maurice L. Farber, Theory of Suicide (New York Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), p. 2.

12 Farber, Theory of Suicide, p. 42.

•'• Kobler and Stotland, The End of Hope, p. 8.

15

watching a crude Caesarean operation on his wife. The

young Indian, confined to a bunk in the Indian hovel be­

cause of a badly cut foot, has watched his wife suffer

through two days of childbirth agony. When Nick's father

arrives, he performs the Caesarean surgery without anes­

thetic or proper equipment, surgery which nonetheless

saves the mother and child. The husband, however, perhaps

feeling guilt for his wife's suffering and utterly help­

less to relieve her pain, finds the situation more than he

can bear. In his desperation and despair, he slashes his

throat silently, liberating himself from the horror. As

Nick's father explains to Nick laten "He couldn't stand 14

things, I guess.

Guilt, coupled with an unbearable sense of dis­

grace, accounts for Captain Hartroy's suicide in Ambrose

Bierce's short story "The Story of a Conscience." In a

story twisted by irony and coincidence, Hartroy is respon­

sible for the execution of an enemy spy who had fomierly

saved him from disgrace and possible death. While a young

private, Hartroy had been responsible for guarding this

same Confederate spy, Dramer Brune, and had fallen asleep

on duty. Brune compassionately did not escape and woke

Hartroy just before his relief guard came, thus saving his

Ernest Hemingway, •'Indian Camp, •' The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 95.

16

reputation and possibly his life. Now Hartroy has cap­

tured Brune a second time and, despite his grief-stricken

conscience, orders his execution. As Brune is before the

firing squad, Hartroy fires a bullet into his own brain

and thus "renounced the life which in conscience he could

15 no longer keep."

The protagonist of "The Mockingbird," another story

by Bierce, is also a victim of Situation Number 2 as it

takes the form of remorse and grief. Private Graylock, on

guard duty in the Union Army, becomes confused as to his

whereabouts and loses his bearings. In his imagination or

in actuality, .he sees a figure in the darkness and fires

a shot which arouses the entire camp. A skirmish ensues.

Only because he does not know which way to go, Graylock

remains at his post and is subsequently praised for his

"bravery." The next day, sensitive to the fact that he may

have precipitated a battle for no reason, he searches for

his victim of the previous night. He finds that he has

shot his twin brother, a Confederate soldier. Overcome by

grief and guilt for his actions, Graylock takes his ov/n

life.

In "Paul's Case,^^ a short story by Willa Gather,

the protagonist chooses suicide when the harsh reality of

•^^Bierce, "The Story of a Conscience,'• The Collected Works, II, p. 177.

17

a life he hates closes in on him. Paul, a sensitive young

man living in industrial Pittsburgh, finds his environment

intolerable and lives in a world of lies and fantasy. Each

time he returns to his neighborhood, he has "the hopeless

feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and common-

16 ness." His fantastic lies about himself and his open

defiance of school authorities lead to dismissal and

trouble with his father. Denied by his father his only

consolations in life, the theater and concert hall, Paul

steals money from his new employer in an attempt to move

into the glittering world of wealth and beauty he so much

acimires. Since he cannot overcome the drabness of his

world, he decides to defy its conventions. He runs away

to New York and lives a life of opulent luxury for a few

days, quickly spending the stolen three thousand dollars.

"Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of

17 boy he had always wanted to be."

When Paul reads of his crime in the Pittsburgh pa­

pers and learns that his father is coming to New York to

take him back to Pittsburgh, Paul realizes what is ahead

of him:

-'- Willa Gather, "Paul's Case," Willa Gather's Col­lected Short Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 248.

Gather, "Paul's Case," p. 255.

18

The grey monotony stretched before him in hope­less, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening vividness.-'-^

His money almost gone and his world of ugliness once again

closing in on him, Paul takes a cab to Newark and throws

himself in front of an onrushing train, thus dropping "back

into the immense design of things." Like the hothouse

flowers he loved so well, Paul had "one splendid breath"

19 in "brave mockery at the winter outside the glass."

Another character for whom the world of wealth is

desirable but unattainable is Gordon Sterrett of "May Day,"

by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gordon is the protagonist of one

of the three plots intertwined in this long story in which

Fitzgerald attempts to show the confusion of values and

general hysteria immediately following World War I, the be-20

ginning of the Jazz Age. Sterrett, a victim of Situation

Number 2, takes his own life when existence for him has be­

come meaningless and empty.

Much of Sterrett's deterioration has taken place

before the story begins. A would-be artist, he has de­

serted his art to drift into meaningless employment. Now,

broke, depressed, and in trouble with a lower class girl,

he contacts a former classmate for a loan to save himself.

l^Cather, "Paul's Case," p. 259.

^^Ibid., p. 261.

2^James E. Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 54.

19

Briefly, he reenters the world of affluence and glamour

by going to a Harvard alumni dance. A former girl friend,

Edith, recoils at the change that has taken place in Gordon

He wasn't at all light and gay and careless—a great lethargy and discouragement had come over him. Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint, surprising boredom.

In a display of self-pity, Gordon confesses to Edith,

"Things have been snapping inside me for four months like

little hooks on a dress . . .I'm very gradually going

loony." His contact once again with the world he has known

and lost, the world of money and material success, seems

to push Gordon farther down the path of total deterioration,

Denied the money he seeks, in the course of the evening he

gets drunk and sometime later that night he marries the

mistress who represents everything in himself and in life

that he despises. Awakening from his drunken stupor the

next morning, he senses the thought flash across his brain

that he is "irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson." This

realization snaps those remaining "hooks" of his already

unstable emotional state, and "leaning across the table

that held his drawing materials, he fired a cartridge into

21 his head just behind the temple."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "May Day," Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), pp. 48, 74.

20

In 0. Henry's sentimental "The Furnished Room,"

the author uses a double suicide to complete his usual

formula story with a surprise ending. A young man, name­

less, has searched a city fruitlessly for five months for

some trace of his girl friend who had left their home town

to try her fortune in show business. Coming to a run-down

boarding house in the slums of the city, he inquires about

the girl once again. The frowzy landlady denies any knowl­

edge of the girl but rents him a room. The boy, sitting

in the grimy disordered room, is suddenly assailed by the

odor of mignonette, his sweetheart's favorite fragrance,

so strong it seems an actual presence in the room. "Oh,

God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a

voice to call?" Desperately he searches the room for some

trace of his love, '•but of her whom he sought, and who may

have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there,

he found no trace. •' Supposedly overcome by despair from

the false hope the scent of mignonette had aroused, he ex­

periences a dramatic •'ebbing of his hope," so desperate

that he ••turned the gas full on again and laid himself 22

gratefully upon the bed.^'

The surprise ending comes in a dialogue between

the landlady and her cronies. By a far-fetched coincidence.

22 0. Henry, •'The Furnished Room, " American Short

Stories of the Nineteenth Century (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930), pp. 370, 371.

21

the young girl had committed suicide in that same room the

week before, the very girl for whom the boy had been so

frantically searching. The mercenary landlady had with­

held this information in order to rent the room. Brooks

and Warren have pointed out the extreme sentimentality of

the story and the lack of convincing motivation for the

. . 23

suicide which occurs. Supposedly, the boy takes his life

in desperation after the mignonette odor raises false

hopes, but as Brooks and Warren show, this incident could

more logically'have enlivened his hopes that his search

was closer to its end. Due to such lack of logic and co­

herence, O. Henry has created a tale •'straining to stir 24 the emotions of the reader" and straining seriously the

reader's ability to suspend his disbelief.

Possibly no other story in this study has aroused

as many contradictory views concerning the cause of a suicide

as has J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish. •'

This short story concerns Seymour Glass, married six years,

on a trip to Florida supposedly in an effort to recover

from a depressed mental state. A telephone conversation

between Muriel, his wife, and her mother during the first

part of the story reveals their gross superficiality and

^^Cleanth Brooks and Robert P. Warren, Understand­ing Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), p. 96.

24 Ibid., 98.

22

lack of true concern for Seymour as a sensitive human be­

ing. The second scene introduces Seymour on the beach,

engaging in fantasy with a small girl named Sybil. In

their conversation Seymour tells her of the "bananafish"

which go into a hole, glut themselves on bananas, and die

because they are too bloated with bananas to escape from

the hole. Returning to his hotel room, Seymour becomes

paranoically indignant in the elevator because he thinks

a strange woman is staring at his feet. Entering his own

room, while his wife Muriel sleeps on one twin bed, Sey­

mour shoots himself on the other.

Critics discussing this story usually do so in the

context of the entire body of Salinger's work, claiming to

find some of the clues to Seymour's suicide in other

stories. Although they disagree, a consensus would ascribe

Situation Number 2 as the cause of Seymour's death. James

E. Bryan admits that whether Seymour's suicide can "repre­

sent abject defeat or a limited victory cannot be deter-25

mined." Warren French claims Seymour commits suicide

"not while depressed but when extraordinarily exhilarated

from surmounting the necessity for compromise." In an­

other essay Bryan insists that Seymour "kills himself in

oc. James E. Bryan, "Salinger's Seymour's Suicide,"

College English, XXIV (1963), p. 229. 26 Warren French, "Salinger's Seymour: Another

Autopsy," College English, XXIV (1963), p. 563.

23

27 a depression of guilt feelings. •' Finkelstein believes

28 Seymour found "the world of normalcy" intolerable.

Wiegand, using another Salinger story for his assertion,

sees Seymour as "surfeited with the joy of life^' and com­

mitting suicide because of his own mystical spiritual ill-29

ness. Paul Levine, pointing out the juxtaposition of

Seymour's rapport with the child Sybil and his total in­

ability to communicate with adults, concludes that Seymour's

"tragic obsession with his own inability to communicate

with the outside world and live with it on its own terms

30 IS what kills him." Gv/ynn and Blotner claim Seymour is

"destroyed by -his ov/n hypersensitivity, pathetically

31 heightened by lack of love."

These last two observations seem most clearly evi­

dent in the story itself. Seymour's mystical experiences

and spiritual insights are nowhere mentioned in this story.

Muriel and her mother reveal themselves as extremely super­

ficial, materialistic people, not genuinely concerned with

^^Bryan, "Reply," College English, XXIV (1963), p. 564.

Sidney Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 227.

2%illiam Wiegand, "J. D. Salinger^s Seventy-Eight Bananafish," Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. by Henry A. Grunwald (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 127.

-^Opaul Levine, '•J. D. Salinger: The Development of the Misfit Hero,^' J. D. Salinger and the Critics, ed. by William F. Belcher and James W. Lee (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1962), p. 94.

^^Frederick L. Swynn and Joseph L. Blotner, The Fiction of J. D. Salinger (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts­burgh Press, 1958), p. 19.

9A Ama A.

the person of Seymour at all. No indication of true af­

fection for him appears anywhere in their conversation.

They discuss Seymour as if he were an object rather than

a human being. Their chatter about styles and social posi­

tion is interspersed with comments on Seymour. Clearly,

he is no more important to them than the current styles in

Miami Beach or the types of characters Muriel has met in

the bar.

When Seymour is introduced, at least a part of his

dilemma is clear. He is an imaginative, sensitive indi­

vidual, kind and gentle to the little girl Sybil. Certainly

the Muriel already depicted would in no way understand him

or give him the kind of love and understanding he requires.

The story of the bananafish offers varied interpretations,

as many critics have shown. In the context of this story

alone, however, they seem to symbolize Seymour's recogni->

tion of his own destruction in an insensitive world con­

cerned only with materialism. As he tells Sybil, '•They 32

die . . . they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease. ••

Seymour too has a terrible disease, inability to cope with

a crass materialistic world totally indifferent to sensi­

tivity. Seymour is able to escape this indifference only

when he "aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his 33

right temple. '• ^^J. D. Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananaf ish, ••

Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), p. 23.

^^Ibid., p. 26.

25

Perhaps the most pathetic victim of suicide in

this category appears in "Clytie" by Eudora Welty. Clytie,

a pitifully lonely little spinster, is the only sympathetic

member of a decadent Southern aristocratic family. Her

father is paralyzed by a stroke, a brother has already com­

mitted suicide, a paranoid sister rules the household

with screams and curses, and the remaining brother is an

alcoholic. In this setting of grotesque Gothic horror,

Clytie has been isolated all her life from normal human

relationships because of a false family pride, since •'The

Farrs were too good to associate with other people."

Clytie's life has been a search for love and an attempt to

discover the mystery of human identity, which she has as­

sociated with the wonder and complexity of human faces.

She goes through the streets of the small town, peering

into the faces of people, since to Clytie

The most profound, the most moving sight in the whole world must be a face. Was it possible to comprehend the eyes and the mouths of other people, which concealed she knew not what, and secretly asked for still another unknown thing?

In her past somewhere Clytie remembers a laughing, happy

face and •'that vision of a face . . . almost familiar, al-34

most accessible" dominates her search. The faces in her

dreary and diseased household, however, are always thrusting

34 Eudora Welty, ••Clytie, " A Curtain of Green and

Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), pp. 159, 163.

26

themselves between her and her vision. This vision and

Clytie's search are actually an attempt on her part to

recover her own original, laughing self or childhood.

Clytie's moment of truth begins when the barber,

motivated purely by greed and convinced that the entire

family is raving mad, comes to shave her father. Poor

weird Clytie, in her loneliness and desperation, touches

the "pitiful, greedy, small face" of the barber "with

breathtaking gentleness^' and is appalled at the ••horrible

moist scratch of the invisible beard, the dense, popping

green eyes—what had she got hold of with her handi" Her

domineering sister screams at Clytie to run out to the

rain barrel to fetch shaving water for her father. In the

reflection of the old rain barrel, Clytie meets ••the face

she had been looking foi;^ but •'Everything about the face

frightened and shocked her with its signs of waiting, of 35

suffering." Seeing her own ugly, distorted face in the

surface of the water completes Clytie's moment of truth.

She realizes in this moment that her search for love is

futile and that her life has been perverted and warped into

a thing of horror. As Ruth Vande Kieft so aptly puts it,

"In that one instant she recognizes the contrast between

the vision of the laughing child of the past and the mirror

image of the ugly and maddened adult of the present."

•^^Welty, "Clytie," pp. 176, 177.

3^Ruth M. Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (New York Twayne, 1962), p. 83.

27

Clytie, in the horror of her discovery, "did the only

37 thing she could think of to do," and plunges her head

into the depths of the rain barrel, drovming. Release from

her suffering comes in the only way possible for Clytie.

In Eudora Welty's only story about the Civil War,

"The Burning," she depicts two Southern aristocratic spin­

sters. Miss Myra and Miss Theo, in the horror and destruc­

tion of war. Two of Sherman's soldiers ride horseback into

the ancestral mansion, rape Miss Myra, and burn the home.

The two ladies with a slave girl wander through the ashes

of the city of Jackson. In their wanderings, they come

upon a hammock in a neighboring yard. Using the hammock

ropes. Miss Theo assists a willing Miss Myra in hanging

and then hangs herself.

The motive for these suicides appears to be twofold.

The ladies do indeed represent the epitome of Southern

aristocracy and antebellum society, which is being destroyed

by the Civil War. Their horror and helplessness in this

destruction is apparent in the story. Miss Vande Kieft

calls the suicides of Miss Theo and Miss Myra "dramatic em-

38 bodiments of a tragic inability to cope with reality."

However, their suicides also seem ritualistic to a degree,

a protest against the brutality they have endured. Miss

" " Welty, "Clytie, •• p. 178.

38 Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty, p. 141

28

Theo, retaining her dignity to the end and displaying in­

credible strength, indicates that the hangings are to be

an object lesson to the Union troops when she says, "And

that's the way they'll find us. The sight will be good for

39 them for what they've done.^'

Dorothy Parker, in •'Big Blonde," shows another vic­

tim of Situation Number 2, even though the suicide attempt

is unsuccessful. In her twenties, the protagonist. Hazel

Morse, a model for a wholesale dress firm in New York,

"took it for granted that the liking of many men was a de-

40

sirable thing/' and all her efforts are bent on maintain­

ing her popularity and being a good sport, so in demand

with the only men she knows. When she marries, however.

Hazel reveals another side—she is domestic, truly in love

with Herbie, and tired of being a ••good sport." She lapses

into blowziness and her natural sentimental nature of weep­

ing easily. Herbie soon tires of this Hazel who is no

longer such a good sport. They quarrel frequently. Hazel

takes more and more refuge in liquor, and Herbie finally

leaves her. From there. Hazel drifts into a life filled

with a succession of lovers, all demanding from Hazel an

increasingly difficult gaiety. She relies on liquor to buoy

oq

Eudora Welty, "The Burning,'• The Bride of Innis-fallen and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 142.

^'^Dorothy Parker, "Big Blonde," A Pocket Book of Short Stories, ed. by M. Edmund Speare (New York: Wash­ington Square Press, 1959), p. 26.

29

her spirits, which, however, become steadily more de­

pressed. Somewhere in her progressive state of depression,

her thoughts become concerned with suicide. "The thought

of death came and stayed with her and lent her a drowsy

sort of cheer. It would be nice, nice and restful, to be

dead." From thinking about suicide. Hazel progresses to

reading avidly all suicide accounts in the newspapers and

feeling a •'cozy solidarity with the big company of the

voluntary dead." As alcohol becomes less and less effec­

tive in restoring her spirits, she finds herself often

"sav/n by the sorrow and bewilderment and nuisance of all

living" and contemplates suicide frequently but finds every

method repulsive except poison, which she does not know

how to obtain. This difficulty is overcome when a friend

recommends a sleeping aid, veronal, but warns against an

overdose. Hazel's breaking point comes when she sees in

the street "a big, scarred horse pulling a rickety express

41

wagon crash to his knees before her" with the owner sav­

agely beating the worn-out animal. Hazel unconsciously

identifies with the work horse and its meaningless exist­

ence. That night she methodically empties the bottles of

veronal, joking to herself that she's so tired she's "nearly

dead."

" • Parker, "Big Blonde," pp. 40, 42.

30

But there is no such easy escape for Hazel. Found

unconscious by her maid, she is brought back to the life

she dreaded so much. When she first regains consciousness.

Hazel "saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering

beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things." As she

faces her continued dreary existence. Hazel "prayed with­

out addressing God, without knowing God. Oh, please,

please, let her be able to get drunk, please keep her al-

42 ways drunk."

Although •'Big Blonde" bears traces of naturalism—

Hazel is trapped by her environment—Theodore Dreiser's

"Typhoon" and Stephen Crane's •'Maggie" present suicide in

more recognizably naturalistic terms. The principal char­

acter of Dreiser's story, Ida Zobel, is reared in a strict

German immigrant household. Ida, a beautiful girl denied

normal boy-girl relationships, is abnormally attracted by

the world of romance and is easy prey for the young man

she is finally allowed to see. VThen Ida becomes pregnant,

the young man refuses marriage. Ida, caught by the fear

of her father and social pressures, faces her lover with a

revolver to force him to make her a ••respectable" woman.

When he again refuses, in emotional hysteria, Ida kills him,

She is taken into custody for the term of her pregnancy,

tried for her crime, and acquitted. The acquittal does not

"^^Parker, "Big Blonde," p. 48.

31

secure Ida a place in conventional society, however, nor

does it restore her father's prestige in the community.

Considering herself a social outcast and unable to face a

future in a society which condemns her, Ida finally returns

to the site of her seduction and calmly steps into the

water of King Lake,

. . . wading out to her knees—her waist—her breast—in the mild caressing water—and then to her lips and over them—and finally, deliberately— conclusively—sinking beneath its surface without

• I- 4*^ a cry or a sigh.^-^

Another example of a story in the naturalistic tra­

dition is Stephen Crane's "Maggie," a portrayal of a girl

of the slums driven to her destruction by the forces of

her environment, both the people around her and the circum­

stances under which she is forced to live. Maggie, living

in the Bowery slum and subjected to beatings and inhumane

treatment by a drunken mother at home, seems at first

strangely untouched by the animalism and brutality surround­

ing her. ••The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.

She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a 44

tenement district, a pretty girl.^'

But Maggie aspires to a better life. When Pete,

a flashy Bowery bartender, comes to visit her brother Jim-

mie, poor Maggie endows him with all sorts of qualities he

^^Theodore Dreiser, "Typhoon," Chains; Lesser Novels and Stories (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 217.

44stephen Crane, '•Maggie, •• The Complete Novels of Stephen Crane, ed. by Thomas A. Gullason (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 115.

D^

does not possess.

Maggie perceived that here was the ideal man. Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.

Maggie's idealized view of Pete causes her to consider her­

self much his inferior and to yearn for the •'romantic••

life she thinks he represents. When he takes her out, she

is overwhelmed by the '•splendor" of the theaters and beer

halls, so in contrast to her squalid home, strewn with the

wreckage of innumerable drunken brawls. Wistfully, Maggie

. . . wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in -a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory.

Maggie is seduced by Pete after a particularly vio­

lent brawl waged by her mother and brother, a brawl in

which her mother hurls drunken curses at Maggie and screams

at her: " . . . yehs have gone t' d' devil. Go wid him,

curse yeh, an' a good riddance. Git out. I won't have such

as youse in me housel" The news of her seduction, however,

is received with righteous indignation by both her mother

and Jimmie, although both are responsible for her dov/n-

fall. The mother, in her own mind, suddenly becomes a

mother who has reared her child with love and understand­

ing and is thus repaid: " . . . she could not conceive how

45 Crane, "Maggie,'• pp. 117, 125.

33

it was possible for her daughter to fall as low as to

bring disgrace upon her family.'• Jimmie, although he has

fathered two illegitimate children himself, is suddenly

the irate brother, angered at the plight of his fallen

sister and damning her "that he might appear on a higher 46

social plane. ••

Maggie, denied her home, becomes increasingly de­

pendent on Pete, who tires of her quickly and eagerly re­

sumes an affair with a former girl friend when she appears

at his bar. Maggie, destitute, returns home, only to be

jeered at and cursed by all the residents of the tenement,

especially her mother and her brother. When Maggie ap­

proaches Pete in his saloon, he scorns her and is indignant

that she should appear at his place of business. Maggie,

wandering the streets aimlessly, with nowhere to go and

with no one to whom she can turn, accosts a priest, hoping

for some help in her situation. But the priest, "made a

convulsive movement and saved his respectability with a

47 vigorous side step. He did not risk it to save a soul."

Thus, Maggie is a victim of her total environment: the

slums of the Bowery; brutal, savage relatives; an irre­

sponsible lover; and a disinterested man of religion.

Several months later, Maggie, reduced now to a

streetwalker, is plying her trade unsuccessfully on a

^^crane, "Maggie," pp. 128, 138, 139.

" " Ibid., p. 147.

34

particularly dark and wet evening. Finally, "She went into

the blackness of the final block^' to the "deathly black hue

48 of the river•• and there Maggie drowns herself, escaping

a life of hopelessness and despair, so different from the

romantic world she had yearned for.

Far from the naturalistic school is Edgar Allan

Poe's '•The Assignation," a bit of sheer melodrama complete

with Byronic hero, beautiful dark-haired maiden, "Satyr­

like" husband, and a double suicide for love. In Venice,

the narrator witnesses the rescue of a child who falls into

the canal from an upper window of the Ducal Palace. The

hero of the tale, of "Herculean strength . . . mouth and

chin of a deity—singular, wild, full liquid eyes . . . 49

profusion of curling, black hair," appears out of the

darkness, dives into the canal, retrieves the child, and

delivers him to the arms of his mother, the beautiful

Marchesa Aphrodite, whose reaction is singularly odd. The

narrator realizes by her reaction that the two know each

other and overhears a whispered arrangement of a meeting

"one hour after sunrise." Offering the dark hero a ride

in his gondola, the narrator agrees to call on the strange

man at davm the next morning. Arriving at his opulent and

exotically luxurious apartment, the narrator is overwhelmed

48 Crane, "Maggie," p. 149.

49 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Assignation," Tales (New

York: Dodd, Mead, 1952), p. 185.

35

by the magnificent splendor of the quarters. After the

dark hero reveals a beautiful full-length portrait of the

Marchesa, he quaffs a cup of wine and reclines on an otto­

man. At that moment, a page from the Marchesa's household

bursts in to announce that the Marchesa Aphrodite is dead

by poison. When the narrator turns to see the reaction of

the dark hero, he is amazed to see that "his limbs were

rigid—his lips were livid—his lately beaming eyes were

50 riveted m death." The "entire and terrible truth"

flashes over the narrator as he realizes that the assigna­

tion the beautiful lovers have made is with death.

In a stranger but not so exotic story, "William

Wilson," Poe warns the reader in an epigraph that his story

concerns the "spectre" of "conscience grim." The first

person narrator, describing himself as an "outcast of all

outcasts most abandoned" and explaining his family of

51 "imaginative and easily excitable temperament" which he

has fully inherited, tells of his life from early school

days to his fatal meeting in Rome with his strange double.

V/hen Wilson is quite young at a school in England,

he first encounters "the other William Wilson," strangely

like himself. Intensely disliking this strange person of

whom no one else seems aware, Wilson, even early, is struck

50 Poe, '•The Assignation," pp. 193, 194.

CI

Poe, "William Wilson," Tales, p. 1.

36

by the fact that the other Wilson brings "to mind dim

visions of . . . earliest infancy—wilci, confused, and

thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet

unborn." Fleeing this school, he sees less of his counter­

part through the years but, at times of extreme degradation

and debauchery, the other Wilson will appear, whispering

his name like a spectre, even though to escape him, Wilson

fled in vain "to the very ends of the earth." The double

follows to Eton and to Oxford, where Wilson realizes this

strange twin is striving only to "frustrate those schemes,

or to disturb those actions, which if fully carried out,

52 might have resulted in bitter mischief."

But Wilson wants no interference in his headlong

pursuit of debauchery and degradation of character, and

when in Rome at a ball, as Wilson is preparing to seduce

another man's wife, his "spectre" appears, Wilson deter­

mines to destroy him. Their encounter takes place in a

small anteroom adjoining the ballroom, where Wilson plunges

his sword "with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and

through his bosom. •' When Wilson turns to secure the door,

however, a huge mirror suddenly appears at the end of the

room, and horrified, Wilson sees his ••own image, but with

53 features all pale and dabbled m blood^' and his double

^^Poe, "William Wilson," pp. 11, 21.

^^Ibid., pp. 23, 24.

/ 37

whispering " . . . henceforward art thou also dead. . . .

In me didst thou exist . . . see by this image, which is

54 thine ov/n, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.'• In

the destruction of his conscience, for surely that is what

the other mysterious Wilson is, William Wilson has also

destroyed himself.

Patrick Quinn calls "William Wilson" a "first per­

son account of a man's struggle with, evasions of, and

final disastrous victory over, his own conscience, the 55

specter in his path." Indeed, there is no evidence that

a second William Wilson exists except for the word of the

narrator. Davidson, in his book about Poe, calls Wilson

"a clever man of the world, who, however, in order to suc­

ceed in the world, must destroy an essential part of him-

. . 56 self, his soul or spirit." The story does reveal Wilson's

gradual descent into degradation. ^ To make the descent com­

plete, he must destroy his conscience, but in the process

he himself is destroyed, and only then does Wilson fully

realize that he and his double are the same.

Diametrically opposed to the melodramatic roman­

ticism of Poe is Robert Penn Warren's realistic and under­

stated story "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger,"

^"^Ibid., p. 24.

^^Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Car-bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), p. 221

56 Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cam­

bridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 198.

38

which portrays both the victory and the defeat of the pro­

tagonist, Jeff York. York differs from the farmers around

him, weathered, gaunt, with "leather-coarse skin," only by

his modest prosperity. By years of backbreaking labor and

extreme thrift, York owns his dirt farm in contrast to the

tenant farmers who are his neighbors. The symbol of Jeff's

final victory over the grim land is the patented gate, an

elaborate mechanical contraption, which York installs at

the entrance to his farm. This gate, a decided luxury,

represents to York his triumph over being poor and rootless.

York's wife, however, does not respect this battle York

has waged with the land. Success to her is exemplified by

the hamburger diner, where York treats his family on their

weekly trip to town. When the diner is put up for sale,

York, forced by his wife to sell his hard-won farm land

and buy the diner, stoically paints the diner and helps his

wife get settled. Then, his spirit dead already and every­

thing he has worked for gone, Jeff York walks to the coun­

try and hangs himself from the patented gate of which he

was so proud.

In Melville's strange story, "Bartleby the Scri­

vener," the protagonist withdraws from society to the ex­

tent that he finally starves himself to death, thus becom­

ing another victim of Situation Number 2. Bartleby, em­

ployed by the narrator, a Wall Street lawyer, is a strange

creature from the beginning of the story. The lav/yer first

39

notices his extreme eccentricity when he asks Bartleby to

proofread some legal documents and is met with the re­

sponse, "I prefer not to." Bartleby gradually recedes

into himself, participating less and less in the office

work until finally he "prefers not to" do any more copying

at all, the only work he has engaged in. He simply sits

and stares endlessly through the window at a totally blank

wall facing the office. In exasperation at Bartleby's re­

fusal to work and his refusal to leave the offices, the

lavTyer eventually moves his business. Bartleby is sub­

sequently evicted by the new landlords and placed in the

Tombs, a prison, on the charge of vagrancy. There, Bartleby

withdraws even more, refusing to eat until he meets the

death he seems to seek.

Melville, famous for his stories of ambiguities,

leaves Bartleby's motive unclear and clouded. What Bart­

leby 's passive resistance is against remains an unanswered

question, although critics have offered various views.

To some, Bartleby is rebelling against those dedicated to

financial profit, the "successful, workaday, bureaucratic C "7 C O

world," and the "false gods of a dehumanized world."

At least one critic sees Bartleby as an object lesson of

what happens when man cuts himself off from society, the

^"^Richard Chase, ed. , Selected Tales and Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Rinehart, 1950), viii.

^^Danforth Ross, The American Short Story (Minnea­polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 15.

40 59

destruction which follows such action.

By far the majority of critics, however, identify

Bartleby either explicitly or implicitly with existential­

ism and the belief that man is born into a purposeless and

indifferent universe and lives a meaningless life which is

rendered absurd in death. Bartleby, seeing clearly this

meaninglessness, symbolized by the blank wall, acts on his

knowledge "that no act of man, let alone belief, will ever

change the 'terrible' limits of the human heart." Bart­

leby 's recognition of the nihilism of life causes his with-

drawal and eventual death. Arvin gives his summation of

Bartleby's story thus:

What Bartleby essentially dramatizes is not the pathos of dementia praecox but the bitter meta­physical pathos of the human situation itself; the cosmic irony of the truth that all are at once im-mitigably interdependent and immitigably forlorn. -'-

To James E. Miller, Bartleby has had a "vision of life's

futility which he cannot overcome.'• To John Bernstein,

"The realization that mankind, whether in the Tombs or in

^^Egbert Oliver, "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'" College English, VI (1945), p. 435.

60 Norman Springer, "Bartleby and the Terror of Limi­

tation, " JPMLA, LXXX (1965), p. 418.

Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950), p. 243.

62 . . . . James E. Miller, A Reader s Guide to Herman Mel­

ville (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1962), p. 160.

41

the 'outside' world, is everywhere imprisoned is what even-

tually destroys the scrivener." Whatever dark vision

Bartleby has glimpsed, life to him has become a thing of

sterility and despair. Some terrible hurt or some terrible

knowledge has caused Bartleby to "prefer not to" live and

to withdraw into death.

Situation Number 2 also encompasses the protagonist

of Sherwood Anderson's "Unused." As Anthony Hilfer has

explained, Sherwood Anderson's characters "are continually

seeking to reach out, to break through the walls of emo­

tional repression, to express their inner voices to another 64

human being." Such is the case of May Edgley. May, very

bright in school and overly strict, reserved, and severe,

is the sole hope of a family of scoundrels, brothers ad­

dicted to alcohol and sisters who are "paid women. •' While

in school. May is temporarily successful in rising above

her situation and winning the approval of the village in

which she lives. After graduation, however, she yields to

the sexual temptation of a local youth, Jerome Hadley, an

impulsive action which brings with it the full condemnation

of society.

John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 170.

64 Anthony Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village

(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 152.

^2

Apparently this yielding is an attempt to communi­

cate the longing May feels within herself but which she

is unable to articulate, a ••tender delicate thing. •'

There was a very tender delicate thing within her many people had wanted to kill—that was certain. To kill the delicate thing within was a passion that obsessed mankind. All men and women tried to do it. First the man or woman killed the thing within himself, and then tried to kill it in others. Men and women were afraid to let the thing live.^^

Anderson's characters often make gestures toward sympathy,

which usually take a sexual form that is "both expression

and betrayal of their primal impulse. . . . " So it is

with May. The sexual experience brings none of the com­

munication May hoped for. The callous Jerome brags of his

conquest, and May is left alone, ostracized by a strict and

puritanical society, even condemned by her own sisters, who

looked upon her as being above such action.

In an effort to win approval of this society. May

resorts to lies about the affair, finally convincing even

herself and living in a world of fantasy which becomes for

her the only world. Finally, May's "tender delicate thing

within her^' is completely destroyed by an unsympathetic

world. She drowns herself, admitting defeat by a society

with no real understanding of the needs of the human heart.

65 Sherwood Anderson, "Unused, '• Horses and Men (New

York: B. W. Huebach, 1923), pp. 76-77. 66 Hilfer, The Revolt from the Village, p. 153.

43

A further example of Situation 2 is '•Ethan Frome, •'

a stark, grim story by Edith Wharton, which deals with a

tragedy which has occurred twenty-four years before the

narrator arrives in Starkfield, Massachusetts. The tragedy,

an unsuccessful attempted suicide, has left in its wake a

living death for the two thwarted lovers. When the young

narrator, an engineer, first comes to Starkfield, he is

immediately attracted by the strange foreboding figure of

Ethan Frome, still ••the most striking figure in Stark-

67 field." Badly crippled and looking far more than his

fifty-two years, Ethan reveals in his face "something bleak

and unapproachable," a look which "neither poverty nor

68 physical suffering could have put there." Fascinated by

the mystery of Ethan, the narrator pieces together his

tragic story.

Ethan in his youth had aspired to a technical edu­

cation and escape from the "sluggish pulse" of Starkfield.

After only one year at technical school, however, Ethan is

forced to return to a failing farm and sawmill. Following

the death of his father, his mother, in poor health and

suffering from a loss of her mental faculties, is finally

cared for by Zeena, a distant relative, whom Ethan marries

67 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Charles S.

Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. 3.

Ibid., p. 5.

44

when his mother dies. Later, puzzling out to himself why

he had married this woman, several years his senior and

totally unsuited to him, he realizes that it came as a re­

sult of a combination of unfortunate circumstances: his

intense loneliness in a demented mother's silence before

Zeena came, his broken communication with the outside world,

the bleak prospect of the lonely winter ahead, so that

. . . after the funeral, he was seized with an un­reasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew it he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that if his^g mother had died in spring instead of winter . . .

And of course Ethan's plan was to sell the farm and try his

luck in a larger town. Zeena, however, suddenly developing

a "sickliness, •' refused to leave Starkfield and became a

querulous, complaining nag, whose fancied ill health made

her "notable even in a community rich in pathological in-

70 stances" and whose medical care kept Ethan financially

drained. Thus, Ethan's dream of escaping Starkfield and

making something of himself has come to nothing. He is

trapped, both in a loveless marriage to a hypochondriac

harridan and in his fruitless and drudging labors on the

failing farm.

Ethan's world comes to life, however, with the ar­

rival of Mattie, a relative of Zeena's, who comes to help

6g Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 70.

^^Ibid., p. 71.

45

Zeena with the housework. Mattie is young, gay, and vi­

brantly alive. Ethan falls helplessly but innocently in

love with her and Mattie returns his love. Their delight

in each other's presence becomes apparent to both when

Zeena makes an overnight trip to a new doctor, and they

have an evening alone, an evening which

produced in Ethan an illusion of long-established intimacy which no outburst of emotion could have given, and he set his imagination adrift on the fiction that they had always spent their evenings thus and would always go on doing so . . .

This idyllic daydreaming is shattered abruptly when Zeena

returns and, evidently suspecting the mutual attraction,

proposes to send Mattie away.

The thought of separation from Mattie throws Ethan

into a turmoil of searching for a way out. After a sleep­

less night and a half-finished note to Zeena, Ethan realizes

the "relentless conditions of his lot. •' If he leaves the

farm to Zeena, which he feels he must do, he and Mattie

will have nothing with which to start a new life. He even

considers borrowing money under false pretenses, but his

sense of duty again intervenes as he thinks of Zeena ••whom

II72 his desertion would leave alone and destitute."

In despair, Ethan and Maggie begin their journey

to put Mattie on the train and out of Ethan's life forever.

' •'-Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 90.

"^^Ibid., pp. 132, 145.

46

When they reach the village, on impulse they decide to take

a sled ride down the great hill, a ride they have promised

themselves for a long time. At the top of the hill, Mattie

pleads with Ethan to drive the sled into the big elm at

the bottom of the hill. Ethan tries to dissuade Mattie,

but •'Her sombre violence constrained him; she seemed the

embodied instrument of fate" and considering his empty life

without her, he consents. But in the •'long delirious de­

scent" suddenly Zeena's face "with twisted monstrous linea­

ments, thrusts itself between him and his goal, and he

73 made an instinctive movement to brush it aside." The

sled swerves, but Ethan thinks he has righted it when it

smashes into the giant elm at the foot of the hill.

The motives of Ethan and Mattie are quite clear at

this point—desperation at their separation, hopelessness

toward a condition they cannot reasonably expect to remedy,

despair at the thought of continuing life without the

other. But Mattie and Ethan do not escape into oblivion

together. They are only horribly mangled, Ethan to be

badly crippled and Mattie to be a helpless invalid, to be

cared for, ironically, by Zeena, who suddenly seems in

better health. Ethan, always tormented by a family grave­

yard near the old farm, where ••for years that quiet company

had mocked his restlessness, his desire for change and

Wharton, Ethan Frome, pp. 167, 170.

47 74

freedom," succumbs to a fate worse than theirs, a living

death with the two women of his life, both now querulous

drones. As one of the neighbors remarks to the narrator,

I don't see there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.^^

Three of Katherine Anne Porter's slender output of

short stories contain suicides, but in only one story,

"Noon Wine," is the suicide victim also the protagonist of

the story. This protagonist is also a victim of Situation

Number 2 described by Klopfer. The events of "Noon Wine"

center on the psychological effects of unpremeditated kill-

ing upon the perpetrator, Mr. Thompson. As Miss Porter

herself has explained, it is "a story of miost painful moral

and emotional confusions, in which everyone concerned . . .

77 is trying to do right."

Mr. Thompson, "who had almost without knowing it

78 resigned himself to failure," and his sickly wife live

74 Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 50.

^^Ibid., p. 181. 76 Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter and 'Historic

Memory,'" Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, ed. by Louis Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 282.

Katherine Anne Porter, "'Noon Wine': The Sources," Yale Review, XLVI (1956), p. 30.

"^^Porter, "Noon Wine, " The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1958), p. 234.

48

on a rather poor farm, neglected partly because of Mr.

Thompson's inability to cope with life and partly because

of his natural laziness. The coming of the strange Mr.

Helton brings an almost miraculous change to the Thompson

fortunes. Mr. Helton's industry soon has the farm neat,

tidy, and making a profit. This prosperity continues for

nine years. Helton's noncommittal nature, jerky mechanical

movements, and strange obsession with his collection of

harmonicas are overlooked by the Thompsons in the face of

their increasing prosperity and good standing in the com­

munity.

When a Mr. Hatch appears one day at the farm, Mr.

Thompson dislikes him on sight. When Hatch informs him

that he has come to return Helton, an escaped mental patient

who has committed murder in another state, Mr. Thompson's

dislike turns to hatred. The argument and fight that en­

sue when Mr. Helton appears result in Mr. Thompson's kill­

ing Mr. Hatch with an ax—a killing Mr. Thompson thinks

he commits to save Mr. Helton's life—but the action is

confused in his mind and Mr. Helton does not bear the knife

wound Mr. Thompson thought he saw inflicted by Mr. Hatch.

Although the court acquits Mr. Thompson of murder, all the

rest of his life is spent in an effort to vindicate him­

self. Thompson is honest enough to realize that his motives

were mixed but he also knows he did not premeditate the

murder. His acquittal, however, does not make his act seem

49

less than murder to his neighbors. As Thompson continues

his battle with his conscience, he begins making the rounc3s

of his neighbors, taking his wife with him to swear his in­

nocence, an innocence in which she does not really be­

lieve.

Thompson's moment of truth comes when he starts out

of his sleep, frightening his wife into an hysterical faint

Summoning his sons, Mr. Thompson sees distrust in their

eyes too and realizes "the last strokes of his swift, sure

79 doom.^^ Comprehending the rejection of even his wife and

sons, Thompson realizes he is utterly alone in his fight,

a fight no longer worth fighting with his family's faith

in him gone. Taking a rifle from the cabinet.

He went out of the house without looking around, or looking back when he left it, passed his barn without seeing it, and struck out to the farthest end of his fields.

Thompson, the only character in this study to leave a sui­

cide note, continues his protest of innocence in his last

message. Then,

. . . trembling and his head . . . drumming . . . he lay down flat on the earth on his side, drew the barrel under his chin and fumbled for the trigger with his great toe. That way he could work it.

"^^Harry J. Mooney, The Fiction and Criticism of Katherine Anne Porter (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts­burgh Press, 1957), p. 42.

^Oporter, "Noon Wine," p. 267.

®^Ibid., p. 268.

50

The suicide victim in "Flowering Judas" by Kather­

ine Anne Porter does not even appear in the story, yet the

suicide is important. The story, set in Mexico, concerns

revolutionary activities in which Laura, the main character,

is involved. Eugenio, a revolutionary confined to prison,

uses drugs Laura takes him to end his life, presumably to

escape from a desperate situation which he considers hope­

less. For the protagonist, Laura, however, there seems to

be a martyr motivation for Eugenie's death. This judgment

will be discussed later in Chapter III.

Situation 3'

Several of Ambrose Bierce's characters find them­

selves in Situation Number 3, described by Klopfer as "a

counterphobic reaction to death," in which the expectation

of death seems so unbearable that the person runs to meet

death to put an end to the horror of dreading it.

In •'A Tough Tussle" young Brainerd Byring, a Federal

officer in the Civil War, has an obsessional hatred of the

dead. "The sight of the dead . . . had always intolerably

affected him" and he "felt a kind of reasonless antipathy.

He could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which

82 had in it an element of resentment." Forced to stay in

the same position on guard duty, Byring is compelled to

^^Ambrose Bierce, "A Tough Tussle," Collected Works, III, p. 108.

51

confront a dead Confederate soldier all night. In the shift­

ing shadows of the moonlight, Byring becomes convinced of

something supernatural about the dead body, even imagining

that the corpse moves and changes position. The corpse be­

comes a supernatural horror to Byring. Following a skirmish

in the early morning hours, the fatigue party discovers

Lieutenant Byring stabbed by his own sword and multiple

sword wounds in the decaying corpse of the Confederate pri­

vate. Lieutenant Byring, pushed to the brink of insanity

by his horrible experience, has rushed to meet the death

he finds so loathsome.

In "One of the Missing" Jerome Searing also lets the

horror of death deprive him of his life. On a reconnaissance

mission. Searing, a private in Sherman•s army, misinterprets

a relatively harmless situation as being an extremely dan­

gerous one. Trapped in the debris of a building destroyed

by a random shot from enemy artillery. Searing becomes con­

scious of the barrel of his rifle pointing directly at his

head. Knowing that he cocked the rifle moments before the

accident. Searing, •'man of courage, the formidable enemy,

the strong, resolute warrior, was as pale as a ghost. He 83

was not insane—he was terrified." Woodruff calls this 84

story the "study of a mind coming unhinged." Searing,

Bierce, ••One of the Missing, •' Collected Works, II, p. 88

Stuart C. Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce: A Study in Polarity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), p. 26.

52

progressing from terror to hysterical panic, finally works

a board free from the debris and pushes the trigger of his

gun to end his horror. Ironically, his gun had been dis­

charged in the collapsing debris, but, as Bierce puts it,

"it did its work," for Searing dies of sheer fright. The

horror of death has succeeded in destroying Searing.

Captain Graffenreid in "One Officer, One Man" mis-

85 ^ interprets both the situation and his own character. The

young officer looks forward joyously to actual combat in

the Civil War: '•Thinking himself a courageous man, his

spirit was buoyant." At the first volley of cannons, how­

ever, his conception of war and of himself undergoes a sud­

den change. '•Was it fear? He feared it was.'^ Seeing his

own fear and forced to lie beside a recently slaughtered

man, he feels his nerves give way. "Nothing suggested a

soldier's death nor mitigated the loathsomeness of the in-

86

cident." Thinking he is still in grave danger and recog­

nizing his cowardice, he plunges his own sword into his

body, thus freeing himself from what he discovered as the

"loathsomeness" of war.

8 5 M. E. Grenander, "Bierce's Turn of the Screw:

Tales of Ironical Terror," Western Humanities Review, XI (1957), p. 263.

^^Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," Collected Works,

II, pp. 203, 204.

53

George Thurston, in Bierce's story of the same

name, tries to subdue his cowardice by recklessly expos­

ing himself to danger, even to the extent of refusing to

surrender and striding into the enemy lines, arms folded

across his breast and head erect. As the stuttering quar­

termaster analyzes his foolhardy bravery, "It's h-is w-ay

of m-m-astering a c-c-consti-t-tu-tional t-tendency to

87

r-un aw-ay." Ironically, Thurston does not die in bat­

tle at all. As the author states, "This intrepid man,

George Thurston, died an ignoble death." Joining a group

of soldiers amusing themselves on a fifty-foot swing,

again he overcompensates for his inherent cowardice and,

heedless of warnings, he swings too high and falls from

the swing. The impact of his body's hitting the earth made

"these men, familiar with death in its most awful aspects,

turn sick." Rushing to his corpse, the soldiers see a

horribly mangled body, but "The arms were folded tightly

88

across the breast." Thurston, fighting bravely his "ten­

dency to run away," has rushed to meet death.

Situation 4

Situation Number 4 is illustrated in Dreiser's

"The Lost Phoebe" and Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall

87 Bierce, "George Thurston," Collected Works, II,

p. 212. 88ibid., pp. 214, 217.

54

Enter First," for in both these stories suicide is moti­

vated by the desire for reunion with a dead loved one.

Apparently, these victims have no clear idea of how the

reunion will take place but simply want to be with the one

person who carried all the meaning of life.

Dreiser, in his short story "The Lost Phoebe,"

carefully builds the relationship of his elderly couple

who •'were as fond of each other as it is possible for two

old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be

fond of." Old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phoebe Ann

have had seven children in their long life together. How­

ever, three children have died and all the others have

become so involved with their own families they give •'little

thought as to how it might be with their mother and fa-

89 ther." Only one girl even lives within the same state

and she seldom visits.

When Phoebe dies, Henry lives in a dreamlike state

of general neglect. He takes less and less interest in

the few chores around the run-down farm. Five months after

his wife's death, he wakes in the night and thinks he sees

her standing in the moonlight of their cabin. Quickly,

Henry passes from illusion to actual hallucination, ex­

pecting Phoebe to return momentarily. He gets an idea

89 Theodore Dreiser, "The Lost Phoebe, •' The Great­

est American Short Stories, ed. by A. Grove Day (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 200.

55

into his disordered mind that he and Phoebe have quarreled

and that she has left him. His sole purpose becomes find­

ing his "lost Phoebe. •' He begins by making the round of

the neighbors, telling them they have quarreled and in­

quiring of her whereabouts. For several years he pursues

his endless search, often not even returning to his cabin

at night but taking a few utensils with him and "camping

out ^ in the countryside. From asking at doors, he pro­

gresses to wandering through the countryside, calling

Phoebe's name. In the seventh year of his wanderings, he

camps near Red Cliff, a sheer mountain precipice. In the

early hours of the morning, he awakes and thinks he sees

Phoebe as a young girl, moving ahead of him in the moon­

light like a will o'the wisp. Coming to the edge of the

cliff, Henry sees Phoebe below in the apple trees blooming

in the spring. Crying her name, he leaps—ecstatic that

he has at last found Phoebe. "No one of all the simple

population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his

90 lost mate."

Clearly, the old man's mind disintegrates after

the loss of his wife. His overdependence on his wife makes

it impossible for Henry to cope rationally with existence

91 without her. He becomes very depressed, for he has no

^^reiser, "The Lost Phoebe," p. 214.

Austin M. Wright, The American Short Story in the Twenties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 222.

~)0

one to whom he can communicate his grief, and an unbear­

able situation results. He relieves his despair tempor­

arily by living in his dream world and by searching for

Phoebe, and he relieves it permanently when he leaps from

the cliff to rejoin his Phoebe.

Another instance of this situation is found in

Flannery O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First," in which

the suicide victim is a small boy deprived of the love and

understanding he needs in his time of grief at the loss of

his mother. Although his mother has died over a year be­

fore, Norton has not recovered from his grief, a grief

which his father considers "not a normal grief" and "all

92

part of his selfishness." The father, a part-time coun­

selor at the reformatory, takes into the home Rufus Johnson,

a fourteen-year-old delinquent with an I. Q. bordering on

genius. Rufus, incorrigible from the first, frightens

Norton and angers him by going into his mother's room and

scattering her personal belongings. Norton begs his father

not to keep Rufus, but Mr. Sheppard only upbraids him for

his "selfishness."

Sheppard, while making an all-out effort to re­

habilitate Rufus and train his brilliant mind, ignores the

needs of his own "mediocre" son. Rufus, on the other

92 Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First,"

Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1956), p. 146.

57

hand, convinces Norton that Norton's dead mother still

exists in a heaven beyond the stars. Norton spends hours

in the attic looking through the telescope Sheppard bought

to "broaden^' Rufus' horizons and which Rufus has largely

ignored. On the night Rufus spitefully violates his parole

by vandalism and is picked up by the police, Norton, be­

lieving he has seen his mother in a star, hangs himself

from the rafters of the attic. Unable to cope with life

as it is, with his father lavishing all his attention and

affection on the delinquent Rufus, and wishing desperately

to be again with the mother of whose love he was sure,

Norton leaves his father to his "good works."

Situation 5

Situation Number 5, the most peculiar of the situa­

tions described by Klopfer, involves a person's search for

freedom and the resulting almost whimsical suicide, which

indicates a desire not to be committed to life or anything

it contains. A possible example of this situation is found

in the character of Amy in Katherine Anne Porter's '•Old

Mortality. •' The precise motivation for the suicide cannot

be determined in this story, and the more important factor

is the effect of Amy's death on the protagonist, Miranda,

an effect which will be discussed in detail in Chapter III.

However, the legend of the beautiful Aunt Amy indicates

some possibility that her death was a result of her search

58

for freedom and her refusal to be tied down to life and

its representative values and responsibilities.

Miranda, the central character of the story, has

grown up with the legend of her beautiful Aunt Amy. Stories

of her beauty, her many suitors, her long rejection and

eventual acceptance of Gabriel, their marriage, and Amy's

death after only six weeks of marriage have constituted

the family's romanticized view of the past, a preoccupation

Miranda eventually terms obsessive. The story concerns

Miranda's disillusionment with and final rejection of this

romanticism, a romanticism centered in Amy, who, through

lack of proper care of her tuberculosis and perhaps by an

overdose of medicine, precipitates her own death, possibly

in the same rejection that Miranda effects--a rejection of

a life of false conceptions and values.

Situation 6

Both Hamlin Garland's "Daddy Deering'^ and Haw­

thorne's "Ethan Brand" illustrate characters enmeshed in

Situation Number 6, which Klopfer calls a person's desire

for closure of a full life.

In Hamlin Garland's "Daddy Deering," the author

sympathetically presents an old man who outlives his use­

fulness. Milton, the young farm boy narrator, first meets

Daddy when he comes to help thresh wheat on their farm.

Daddy is old even then, sixty or more, but Milton observes

59

that "At some far time vast muscles must have rolled on

those giant limbs. . . . " He is still able to perform his

work admirably, always taking on the hardest and dirtiest

tasks, as if to prove his endurance and ability remain.

Milton, who does not share Daddy's enthusiasm for farm

labor, at first resents the boisterous old man and his al­

ways unfinished tales. Later, however, he develops a fond­

ness and acMiration for the oldster, even though Daddy is

often the object of good-natured ridicule by the other men.

The old man's joy in work extends to other chores besides

threshing, as Milton learns when winter and hog-killing

time comes. Daddy takes particular delight in hog-killing.

His pride in his ability to catch and properly kill a hog was as genuine as the old knight-errant's pride in his ability to stick a knife into another steel-clothed brigand like himself. -

Scolding and chafing the boys the entire time. Daddy takes

enormous pride in the skinning process, considering the

finished hog a work of art.

But even above his delight in farm work is Daddy's

love for the fiddle, which he plays for the country square

dances. Milton now sees a different side of Daddy, but

the characteristic fervor is there. Daddy is always start-

lingly clean at the dances, even topping his old red work

Hamlin Garland, "Daddy Deering, •' Other Main Travelled Roads (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), pp. 122, 126.

60

shirt with a paper collar for the festive occasions.

Flushing with pleasure at the sound of his own music, the

old man fiddles, calls the squares, and even takes part in

the dancing, kicking and stamping madly as the musicians

play faster and faster. Milton is delighted with the an­

tics of Daddy Deering as he watches him thoroughly enjoy­

ing himself.

As Milton grows toward manhood, however, he sees

changes in the country and in the general feeling toward

Daddy Deering. His fiddling is now considered old-fash­

ioned and obsolete. Fewer and fewer people welcome Daddy

into their homes as the old ones die and many of the others

move away. •'There were few homes where the old man was

94 even a welcome visitor and he felt this rejection keenly."

Now when Daddy works, the other men give him the easier

jobs, much to Daddy's resentment and dismay. Their good-

natured joking and fun poking give way to a compassion

hard for Daddy to endure. "Men began to pity him rather

than laugh at him, which hurt him more than their ridi-

95 cule."

Long after he is able. Daddy continues to work,

although heavy farm labor becomes more and more of an ef­

fort for him. Suddenly two accidents end both Daddy's

94 Garland, "Daddy Deering," p. 134.

95 Ibid.

61

working days and his fiddle playing. His left hand is

mangled in farm machinery, and shortly after, he cuts his

foot with an ax, laming himself. Both accidents come as

a result of a drastic slowing of Daddy's formerly alert

reflexes. The accidents are traumatic for the old farm

hand. "The pain was not so much physical as mental. It

brought age and decay close to him. For the first time

96 m his life he felt that he was fighting a losing battle."

From this time on Daddy Deering is a wasted ghost

of his former blustering, boisterous self, as he begins

"to think and to tremble," sitting huddled by his old stove,

wrapped in a quilt. When Milton visits him, he is shaken

by the horrible change in the old man who "had gloried in

his strength" and who now is a pitiful, helpless creature.

Milton returns home, worried and fearing Daddy's death is

near. The very next morning. Daddy's hired hand runs

wildly into Milton's home, declaring, "Daddy's killed him­

self." When Milton arrives at Daddy's house, he finds

him lying in the yard, half-covered with snow, a revolver

in his hand. But to Milton's intense relief, "there was

no mark on him. " Daddy Deering had not fired the gun in

his hand, but a very welcome death had come at last to the

old pioneer spirit, who need fear no more the wasting of

his great strength. Milton, relief and grief intermingling

^^Garland, "Daddy Deering," p. 136.

62

as he gazed at the body, observed.

There was a sort of majesty in the figure half buried in the snow. His hands were clenched, and there was a frown of resolution on his face, as if he had fancied Death coming, and had gone defiantly forth to meet him.^^

Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" also presents a character

seeking closure to a life which has achieved its purpose,

although that purpose has succeeded in destroying the

moral fiber of Ethan Brand. Brand's suicide is an almost

ritualistic act in which he leaps into the fire which had

provided his inspiration eighteen years before. During

all these years. Brand sought the world over for the Un­

pardonable Sin, only to find it at last in his own soul.

Returning to his former home, he describes the sin to a

group of villagers as the "sin of an intellect that tri­

umphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence

for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty

claims." His quest has been one for knowledge, gained

without love, and one which desecrates mankind by "psycho­

logical experiment." His obsessive desire for knowledge

drove him until "he had lost hold of the magnetic chain

of humanity." His quest ended and his mission completed,

Brand returns to the lime-kiln he formerly tended and

from which he "had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from

the hot furnace . . . to confer with him about the

97 Garland, "Daddy Deering," pp. 136, 139.

63

Unpardonable Sin" and leaps into its fiery depths after

the villagers have returned to their homes.

Critics have offered varied explanations of Brand's

suicide. Vanderbilt calls his final act "inevitable^' be­

cause of his complete isolation from man and sees Brand

as anticipating the Existential rebel of modern fiction in

his failure to seek the forgiveness of a merciful God.

Levy calls Brand a success and calls his quest •'a parable

of how to succeed at spiritual self-destruction."

McCullen and Guilds designate Brand "the one fit sacrifice

which he can hurl upon the altar of his acknowledged mas-

ter, Satan."

Indeed, nowhere in the story does Brand show evi­

dence of remorse or regret for his deed. As Brand sits

alone in the night beside the lime-kiln, he surveys his

past life and the gradual change which has been wrought in

it. He began his quest for knowledge with sympathy and

98 Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," American

Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), pp. 66, 77, 60.

99 Kermit Vanderbilt, '•The Unity of Hawthorne's

'Ethan Brand,'" College English, XXIV (1963), p. 455. 100

Alfred J. Levy, "'Ethan Brand' and the Unpardon­able Sin," Boston University Studies in English, V (1961), p. 183.

101 Joseph T. McCullen and John C. Guilds, ••The Un­

pardonable Sin in Hawthorne: A Re-Examination, •• Nineteenth Century Fiction, XV (1960), p. 235.

64

pity for mankind, but his "vast intellectual development"

overshadowed any development of his heart until '•it had

contracted . . . hardened . . . perished. •• His analysis

of his situation seems a completely objective one, devoid

of regret. During his reverie, he announces that "were

it to do again, would I incur the guilt" and "Unshrink-

10 2

ingly, I accept the retribution." This admission ne­

gates any possibility that Brand commits suicide in remorse

for his loss of humaneness or in a fit of depression be­

cause he has become totally cut off from his fellow man.

McCullen and Guilds call his willful impenitence itself

103 the Unpardonable S m and the point of the story.

In reality. Brand has come full circle and has re­

turned to his beginning for his end. His sense of comple­

tion of his quest echoes in his words, "What more have I

to seek? What more to achieve? My task is done, and well

done." Brand is apparently ready and willing to die, even

knowing that he is condemned to Satan. Standing upon the

rim of the lime-kiln, he bids farewell to Mother Earth,

mankind whom he has cast off, and the stars of heaven. But

his direct address goes to the fire of the furnace and sup­

posedly the devil residing therein as this Faust-like

102Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," pp. 74, 66.

103 McCullen and Guilds, p. 236.

65

figure leaps to his fiery death with the words "Embrace

me, as I do thee.""'" '

Situation 7

Another story of Flannery O'Connor's, "The River,"

provides the sole example of Situation Number 7 which

Klopfer calls "a longing for spiritual rebirth." As in

her "The Lame Shall Enter First," the suicide victim is

a small child, an "innocent.'• Harry Ashfield, "four or

five," is the small son of negligent parents who leave

his care to a succession of nursemaids and baby sitters.

Mrs. Connin, one of his sitters, takes Harry to a •'heal­

ing" and baptismal service at a river. Discovering that

Harry has never been baptized, Mrs. Connin hands the child

over to the preacher, who immerses him in the river and

promises him that baptism will make him •'count now ^ and

that he will "be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ . . .

105 by the river of life.'• Harry, who has never counted

with his indifferent parents and whose home has consisted

of an apartment filled with the dirty glasses and ciga­

rette butts of innumerable cocktail parties, takes the

preacher's words literally instead of metaphorically.

•^^^Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," pp. 75, 76.

105 Flannery O'Connor, "The River," A Good Man Is

Hard to Find (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 34.

66

The following morning, arising while his parents

are still sleeping off hangovers and, as usual, having

to scavenge for something to eat in the littered apartment,

Harry yearns for the sense of significance he felt during

the baptism. Suddenly filled with a longing to return to

the river and find the Kingdom of Christ, he leaves the

apartment, not taking a suitcase "because there was nothing

from there he wanted to keep." Arriving at the river, he

plunges in, until "the waiting current caught him like a 106

long gentle hand and pulled swiftly forward and down.^'

Thus, Harry, unwanted and uncared for, finds salvation

from a world of indifference and perhaps also finds the

Kingdom of Christ.

•"•^^O"Connor, "The River," pp. 38, 40.

CHAPTER III

EFFECTS OF THE SUICIDES ON SURVIVORS

For the majority of the short stories in this study,

the suicide came at the very end of the stories and any

effect on other characters was unknown. In the remaining

stories, however, the effects on the surviving characters

fall into three main categories: (1) initiation into

the real world or a growth to a new awareness of life as

a result of the suicide, (2) a sense of guilt for having

been responsible or partly responsible for the suicide,

and (3) a failure to accept responsibility in the suicide

when responsibility is clearly apparent. Aside from these

categories is the effect on those characters whose suicide

attempts were unsuccessful and their feelings when their

attempts to destroy themselves have failed.

"Indian Camp,'• a typical Nick Adams story and very

likely the first one, is basically concerned with Nick's

initiation into the harsher realities of life. Nick wit­

nesses the cycle of life in this story—a painful, un­

natural birth and a violent, self-inflicted death. The

suicide of the young father introduces Nick harshly to

the existence of death and its horror. Nick sees the

Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York: Rine­hart, 1952), p. 261.

67

68 2

Indian with "his throat cut from ear to ear.^' That Nick

is shaken by the experience is revealed later in the boat

when he questions his father about suicide and death. The

dialogue between the father and son reveals what the story

is really about: "the question of endurance, the question 3

of suicide, and the relationship of father to son.^'

Through his father's wisdom and understanding, Nick is re­

assured and at the end of the story "sitting in the stern

of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure 4

that he would never die.^'

The effect of Bartleby's death on the lawyer nar­

rator of "Bartleby the Scrivener" is significant but puz­

zling. To most critics the lawyer narrator is actually

the main character of the tale and its primary concern is

the effect of Bartleby's death on the narrator. Just what

the narrator learns as a result of his experience, however,

is a point of controversy. Even the narrator's final

statement concerning Bartleby is in itself ambiguous. The

critic John V. Hagopian believes that Bartleby "aroused

his pity, drove him to distraction, and finally initiated

him to the brotherhood of those who know the sad truth

2 Ernest Hemingway, "Indian Camp,'• The Short Stories

of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 94.

3 Young, Ernest Hemingway, p. 30.

4 Hemingway, "Indian Camp," p. 95.

69 5

about the human condition." Kingsley Widmer stresses

the fact that "Bartleby•s perversity has forced the narra­

tor to recognize the nihilism of life which he has sys-6

tematically denied. •• Both Widmer and Frank Davidson see

Bartleby as simply another part of the narrator's self,

"the bland attorney's specter of rebellious and irrational 7

will" who haunts him and leaves a distinct impression on

the narrator of his worth.

A more optimistic effect on the narrator is ex­

pressed by John Bernstein:

The lawyer outgrows his initial position of callous­ness and lack of concern for his fellows and comes to realize that no man is an island, that to be human means to be involved with the human situa­tion.^

Leon S. Roudiez thinks the narrator learns, through the

death of Bartleby, that isolation from society is disas-9

trous and destroys the individual. Danforth Ross considers

Bartleby's death a sacrifice which reveals to the narrator

^John V. Hagopian, "Melville's 'L'Homme Revolt,'" English Studies, XLVI (1965), p. 390.

^Kingsley Widmer, The Literary Rebel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. 52.

7 Frank Davidson, '•'Bartleby': A Few Observations,"

Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 27 (1962), p. 26. Q

John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), p. 17.

9 Leon S. Roudiez, "Strangers in Melville and Camus,"

French Review, XXXI (1958), p. 437.

70

the hollowness of his own life and the fact that he has

been up to this point spiritually dead and will perhaps

become more spiritually alive as a result of Bartleby's

10 death.

Exactly what Bartleby's death communicates to the

lawyer rests with Melville, but it is clear from the story

that the narrator's complacency has been severely shaken.

He no longer looks at himself with the smug satisfaction

displayed earlier. He also realizes that his and all man­

kind's compassion is totally insufficient for the need.

However, his compassion for both Bartleby and mankind

finds voice in his cry, "Oh Bartleby, Oh humanity!" after

the death of the strange scrivener.

For Miranda, in "Old Mortality," the legend of

Aunt Am^ which ends in her suicide, serves as the center

of the romantic past as idealized by Miranda's family. In

the three sections of the story, Miranda is eight, ten,

and eighteen years old respectively. These sections show

the gradual disillusionment of Miranda and her growing

awareness of the contrast between the romanticized picture

of the family and the past as preserved by elders and the

concrete evidence she discovers in her growth toward ma­

turity. When Mirancaa is ten, she meets Gabriel, the fableci

suitor anca husbanci of the beautiful Amy. This meeting

Danforth Ross, The American Short Story, p. 16.

71

brings home to Mirancia at least part of the falsity of

the family myth, for now she sees Gabriel for what he is:

a fat, red-faceci man given to cirinking anci gambling. When

Mirancia is eighteen and meets her Cousin Eva on the train

returning home for Gabriel's funeral, her disillusionment

with Aunt Amy is furthered as the deeply embittered Eva

reveals her extreme hatred for Amy and the entire family,

hinting at a scandal surrounding Amy and openly asserting

Gabriel's unhappiness during the honeymoon. Eva's exag­

geration of the evil in the family causes Miranda to re­

ject her warped view but also causes her to complete her

rejection of the family's equally warped view of the past.

Miranda is determined to form her own perspective, cutting

loose all family ties. Ray B. West calls Miranda "any

child, anywhere, seeking to come to terms with her past 11

and her present—seeking definition. •' At the story's

close, Miranda has not found the truth, but she has dis­

covered what the truth is not. She is also determined to

continue her search as she promises herself, '•At least I

can know the truth about what happens to me. . . ." But

Miss Porter hints that Miranda's optimistic outlook for

the future promises further disillusionment as she adds

1 Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter and 'Historic Memory,'" Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Mod­ern South, ed. by Louis D. Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 289.

72

that Miranda makes this vow "in her hopefulness, her ig-

1.12 norance."

Characters in both "Flowering Judas" and "The Lame

Shall Enter First" experience a sense of guilt and remorse

for what they consider their blame in the suicides in

these stories. In "Flowering Judas^' Laura is the unwit­

ting instrument for Eugenio's death. She takes drugs to

Eugenio in prison, supposedly to relieve his boredom and

sense of frustration, while awaiting his release. But

Eugenio uses the drugs to end his life. Reinforcing

Laura's sense of guilt is a nightmare she experiences the

night after Eugenio's death. In this dream Eugenio accuses

Laura of murdering him and forces her to eat of the blos­

soms of the Judas tree which grows in the courtyard below

Laura's window. Laura's sense of betrayal of Eugenio and

of the revolution are evident in the nightmare. Before

Eugenie's death, ever since she has been in Mexico, Laura

has been determined "to serve the revolutionary ideal and

13

at the same time hold herself above corruption." Seeing

the corruption of such revolutionaries as Braggioni has

caused Laura to perceive a disparity between her way of

12 Katherine Anne Porter, "Old Mortality," The Col­

lected Stories of Katherine Porter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1958), p. 221.

13 Charles Allen, "Southwestern Chronicle: Kather­

ine Anne Porter, •' Arizona Quarterly, II (1946), p. 91.

73

life and her feeling of what life should be. But her

aloofness has resulted in isolation from her fellow men

and an incapability for genuine human feeling or passion.

As Ray B. West has pointed out, Laura is incapable of ade­

quate emotional response in three areas of her life:

Laura has supposedly forsaken her Catholicism, although

she still sneaks into church infrequently to try to pray;

in the revolution, Laura cannot participate in the revolu­

tionary fervor of the other workers; and in erotic love,

14 Laura responds to none of her three suitors. She is

even unable to respond warmly to the small children she

teaches. Eugenie's death and the consequent dream reveal

to Laura her betrayal of both Eugenio and the revolution

as an ideal. Hendrick sums up Laura's guilt thus:

Without courage to disentangle herself, she drifts along in the movement, is filled with despair, feeds on the lives of others, and realizes the full extent of her betrayal only in a symbolic dream.15

In "The Lame Shall Enter First" Sheppard comes to

at least a partial recognition of his failure with his son

and of his blame in his death. When Sheppard finally real­

izes his son needs him more than any delinquent does, it

is too late. Dashing up the attic stairs, Sheppard sees

his child hanging "in the jungle of shadows, just below

l^Ray B. West, "Katherine Anne Porter: Symbol and Theme in 'Flowering Judas,'" Accent, VII (1947), p. 185.

15 George Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter (New York:

Twayne, 1965), p. 41.

74

the beam from which he had launched his flight into space."

Sheppard's ••heart constricted with a repulsion for himself

so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had

stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton."

Sheppard sees now how sterile Norton's existence has been

and how starved for love and affection the child was—a

love and affection he as his father had denied him.

In two of the stories of this study, the effect on

some of the remaining characters is one of unassumed re­

sponsibility for blame with ironic overtones. In Crane's

••Maggie," the relatives of Maggie react to her death in

ways which reveal their superficiality and total lack of

emotional depth. When Jimmie, Maggie's brother, announces

Maggie's death to her mother, Mary Johnson dissolves into

howling grief, but significantly this showy display of

grief comes only after she finishes the meal she is eating.

She proceeds to mourn dramatically, finally holding a pair

of Maggie's faded baby shoes and being consoled by her

neighbors, who mouth religious platitudes about Maggie's

having "gone where her sins will be judged" and about the

fact that "Deh Lord gives and de Lord takes away." Appar­

ently, Mary feels no guilt for Maggie's death and is re­

acting as she thinks she is expected to react for the

benefit of the neighbors. The story ends with Mary's

p. 154.

-I (1

Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First,"

75

screaming, "Oh, yes, I'll forgive herl I'll forgive her."

Jimmie, on the other hand, curses when ordered by his

mother to claim Maggie's body and bring it home, leaving

17 the tenement with a "dragging reluctant step.^' Clearly,

both Maggie's mother and brother assume no responsibility

for Maggie's tragic death. They see her life and her

death as only a nuisance or something to be forgiven by

them while they obtusely refuse to realize that they are

in reality the major cause of Maggie's fate.

The effect of Lieutenant Brayle's heroic suicide

in "Killed at Resaca" is at once the expected and an ironic

one, but the person responsible for his death does not as­

sume that responsibility. The expected effect is regis­

tered by the soldiers in the field. At the moment of

Brayle's courageous rush into the open field to deliver a

message to another flank of the army, his fellow soldiers,

inspired by his bravery, swarmed into the open, giving him

cover fire in an effort to save his life. When he is

killed, the stretcher bearers "moved unmolested into the

field, and made straight for Brayle's body." Even the

enemy honors such bravery by stopping the battle and play­

ing a dirge on drums as "A generous enemy honored the

18

fallen brave." The effect on the responsible one, how­

ever, is altogether different. The narrator of the story.

17 Crane, "Maggie, •• pp. 153, 154

18 Bierce, "Killed at Resaca," pp. 100, 102

76

a comrade of Brayle's, delivers a letter found on Brayle's

body which showed the cause of his foolhardy actions: his

sweetheart's fear that he would not perform bravely in

battle. The girl, ironically, is repulsed by the sight

of the blood on the letter and flings it into the fire.

She accepts no responsibility in his death, seemingly

making no connection between her letter and Brayle's heroic

but foolhardy action. Brayle's death, caused by this girl,

is utterly meaningless to her.

In both "Ethan Frome" and "Big Blonde" the would-

be suicides do not succeed. In neither case is there a

sense of relief at being snatched back from the jaws of

death. The characters' hopelessness and despair only con­

tinue. Although Ethan's thoughts are not revealed, it is

clear from the details of the story that his fate is worse

than his proposed death as he is forced to live with the

consequences of his action: the spiteful Zeena and the

once vibrant Mattie who is changed to a helpless, whining

invalid. Ethan's face, with its "bleak and unapproachable"

look, betrays his years of suffering and despair as he is

forced to endure his tragic and hopeless existence.

On the other hand, in "Big Blonde, •' Hazel's

thoughts are revealed and her desperation graphically

shown as she realizes that her attempt to escape from her

dreary existence has failed. The picture of the pathetic

old worn-out work horses stumbling and dragging themselves

77

along the streets flashes through her mind as she sees

herself wearily plodding through the meaningless years

ahead. Evidently, both Ethan and Hazel regret that life

did not end for them as they had planned.

In the remaining stories of this study, the sui­

cides have no discernible effect on any of the surviving

characters, usually because the suicide occurs at the very

ends of the stories. The only effect of these suicides is

the impact on the reader, and this is a part of the over­

all theme. This effect, therefore, will be discussed in

the following chapter.

CHAPTER IV

THE AUTHORS'PURPOSES IN USING

THE SUICIDE THEME

The aim of any serious student of literature is

to arrive at the author's purpose or commentary on life

that emerges from any particular work. This commentary

is usually thought of as the theme, the view of life as

the author sees it through his characters, their actions,

and reactions to the circumstances in which they are

placed. Regardless of how carefully a work is read and

studied, no reader can be certain about an author's inten­

tion or purpose. Therefore the judgments and inferences

set forth in this chapter may be incorrect at times since

they are often the product of this researcher's own in­

terpretation .

Within this area of study, each author's purpose

seems closely intertwined with his assignment of respon­

sibility for the suicide within a given story. Of course,

any suicide is largely the responsibility of the person

who kills himself. Other forces, however, figure promin­

ently in many of the stories. In these stories, it is

quite clear that the characters would not have committed

suicide had they lived in different circumstances. Three

categories emerge when the authors' purposes are viewed

78

79

in this light. The first category involves stories in

which the responsibility for the suicide lies almost com­

pletely with the weaknesses which become so pronounced,

with or without other influences, that they lead to self-

destruction. In these cases, the author's purpose may

be a warning against allowing such character flaws to

gain control. Secondly, some stories cast blame on other

characters, who, by their lack of consideration, neglect,

or brutality, drive the victims to suicide. The author' s

purpose in such instances may be a condemnation of such

brutal qualities. Last, often the author suggests that

society or the particular environment is partly to blame

for the suicide. Although it is true that environment

actually consists of both living conditions and other per­

sons, in this present chapter, environment is considered

only the living conditions surrounding the character, the

situation in society into which he is placed, or society

itself in terms of such things as materialism or moral

conventions. In stories of this category, the author's

purpose may be a criticism of sordid living conditions or

a condemnation of society as a whole. Of course, such

categorization is arbitrary since all three of these as­

pects are involved in all suicides. There is no way to

separate a personality from the environmental forces sur­

rounding him, both his living conditions and the people

80

with whom he is closely associated. For the purposes of

this study, however, an attempt was made to discover the

author's view as to which aspect was most prominent in

each instance of suicide.

In Fitzgerald's "May Day" Gordon Sterrett is

largely responsible for his eventual suicide. Fitzgerald

shows the weaknesses of this character from the begin-

ning--his inability to pursue diligently his art, his sus­

ceptibility to women such as Jewel Hudson, and his over­

all lack of drive to attain the wealth and success he

supposedly desires. Although environment plays a part—

Sterrett does not have the inherited wealth of his former

classmates—Fitzgerald places most of the responsibility

on Sterrett's shoulders for his degeneration and final

self-destruction.

Hawthorne has a similar approach, as Richard H.

Fogle has pointed out in his study: " . . . for Hawthorne

the moral meanings of things were inseparable from their

aesthetic value and significance; his creative imagina-1

tion and his moral perceptions are not to be disentwined"

Almost any Hawthorne story will have a moral, many times

stated within the story itself, and presumably the pointing

Richard H. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), p. 43.

81

out of this moral is the main purpose of the author. It

is clear from "Ethan Brand" that Hawthorne is pointing

out that man is in danger of committing an unpardonable

sin and alienating himself from mankind and God. Critics

of this story, however, disagree as to what comprises the

unpardonable sin. Fogle calls the sin one of "Inconceiv-

2 able pride, which has alienated him from God and man."

Mark Van Doren says the sin lies in the search itself and

3 also ••in the violence he has done to the souls of others.'•

A. N. Kaul points out that Brand's sin is not intellectual

inquiry but occurred when "in the pride of his intellec­

tual power, he willfully alienates himself from human-

4

ity." Whatever precisely Hawthorne meant by the Unpar­

donable Sin, it led to a divorcement of Brand from human­

ity and a sympathy with his fellow man. This isolation,

Hawthorne seems to be saying, is not only an evil threat

to the entire human race, but fatal to the one who commits

this sin. He uses Brand's suicide to show the destruc­

tion of a man engulfed in intellectual pride at the ex­

pense of the development of his heart.

2 . . >.. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction, p. 44. 3 Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York:

William Sloane, 1949), p. 139. 4 . . , . A. N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and

Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 161.

02

Also showing man's willful destruction of him­

self is Poe's "William Wilson." A. H. Quinn calls this

story "the tragic consequences of a separation of moral 5

and physical identity. •' By the end of the story, the

physical and spiritual aspects of Wilson have become so

far separated that one can exist only at the expense of

the other. Wilson, as a being, destroys himself. Poe

seems to be exhorting a balance between the spiritual and

physical aspects of man and implying that when the moral

or spiritual side, the conscience, is ignored, destruction

will result. In the other Poe story, "The Assignation,"

the •'Byronic Hero," unable to live without his love, kills

himself. Again the weakness of the character is predomi­

nant. Poe's purpose in this story must be his usual one

of creating a single effect of suspense and horror. Due

to the extravagant melodramatics of the tale, however,

the effect Poe achieves is almost ludricrous to the modern

reader.

In "Noon Wine" the author also makes the character

of Thompson largely responsible for his own destruction.

Society plays a part in his downfall by its condemnation

of Thompson's unintentional killing, but it is primarily

Thompson's lack of inner strength that prefigures his doom,

5 A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biog­

raphy (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), p. 286.

03

His weaknesses are stressed early in the story in his in­

ability to manage the farm, his ineffective disciplining

of his children, and his innate laziness. Thompson is a

sympathetic character but one in whom a tragic flaw is

easily discernible.

Among those stories assigning the major responsi­

bility for the suicides to other characters are "Flower­

ing Judas," "Clytie," "The River," "The Lame Shall Enter

First, •• and "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger. ••

In •'Flowering Judas" the characters of both Braggioni and

Laura are responsible for Eugenie's death—Braggioni's

corruptness and lack of true devotion to the revolution­

ary cause and Laura's inability to feel and express na­

tural human emotions. Miss Porter's main purpose in this

story seems to be pointing out the dangers of isolation

from mankind, as exemplified by the character of Laura,

who, by her aloofness, has cut off any meaningful rela­

tionship with others and thereby has become spiritually

barren and emotionally dead. It is this same involvement

with mankind for which Clytie searches so frantically and

fruitlessly throughout her pitiful life. The members of

Clytie's family are largely responsible for her destruc­

tion since they, warped and isolated from society them­

selves, have denied Clytie the opportunity of meaningful

human relationships. Ruth M. Vande Kieft has pointed out

that Miss Welty's stories are largely concerned with "the

84

mysteries of inner life . . . with what is secret, con­

cealed, inviolable in any human being, resulting in dis-

6 tance or separation between human beings." Robert Penn

Warren has observed that the theme of isolation is central

in Miss Welty's fiction. In the character of Clytie,

Miss Welty shows vividly the isolation and yearning for

love in the human heart. Clytie, so aware of the possible

wonder and beauty of the world around her, meets nothing

but denial and brutality. Miss Welty uses Clytie's sui­

cide to show what such isolation from love wreaks—the

destruction of the soul—and to epitomize the utter fail­

ure of Clytie to escape into a world of love and meaning.

The child's yearning in "The River" is similar to

Clytie's, a yearning for meaningful relationships, both

physical and spiritual. Neglectful and indifferent par­

ents are largely to blame for the child's final act of

suicide. Miss O'Connor stresses in this story the spiri­

tual dearth of the modern world, symbolized in the story

by parents concerned only with themselves and with no time

or affection for the small child. This same theme per­

meates "The Lame Shall Enter First,' in which Miss O'Connor

Ruth Vande Kieft, "The Mysteries of Eudora Welty," Georgia Review, XV (1961), p. 345.

7 Robert Penn Warren, "Irony with a Center:

Katherine Anne Porter," Kenyon Review, IV (1942), p. 250.

85

uses the suicide of Norton to illustrate the death of the

"innocents'^ of this world and the destruction of religious

faith. Even though she is censuring a secular society,

she uses the character of Sheppard to symbolize this so­

ciety and places the responsibility for the child's sui­

cide on the father's shoulders. Norton, ready to accept

God, is denied the opportunity through lack of knowledge

and by his secular environment in which his father denies

all existence of God. The sacrifice of an innocent child

is harsh and the hanging grotesque in this story, but Flan­

nery O'Connor, speaking as a Christian writer, explained

that this is often the only way to speak to a secular

world. In an essay explaining her use of the grotesque

and ugly she says,

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.°

Explaining elsewhere in this essay that she always looks

out from "the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy•' and that

for her "the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption

9 by Christ," Miss O'Connor makes clear that it is impossible

Q Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), p. 52.

^Ibid., p. 54.

86

to view any of her work out of the Christian context from

which she writes. Clearly, in "The Lame Shall Enter First"

her foremost condemnation is reserved for Sheppard in his

disbelief. The death of the child through Sheppard's con­

cern, therefore, becomes her picture of what intellectual

pride can do to God's grace and salvation.

In "The Patented Gate and the Mean Hamburger,"

York's shallow and superficial wife is largely to blame

for his death. Her lack of understanding greatly con­

tributes to his suicide. In the sympathetic character of

Jeff York, Robert Penn Warren shows the utter despair re­

sulting from York's painfully gained knowledge that his

hard work and sacrifice have not brought the happiness

he dreamed of. His wife, to whom the good life meant the

"civilized'• way of town and specifically the hamburger

stand, does not share his dream nor his triumph when the

farm is finally his. His death reflects the terrible

irony of a success which brings about his destruction.

By far the largest number of stories seem to con­

tain some criticism of society, whether this be the im­

mediate environment of the character or society as a whole.

Essentially, an author always gives his view of the uni­

verse, his view of life in our society, and many times he

blames this society for the ills which befall the human

beings at its mercy.

87

Ambrose Bierce was such an author. Stuart C.

Woodruff has remarked the significant regularity with

which suicide is used in Bierce's stories. To him, sui­

cide illuminated the heart of Bierce's "vision of the hu­

man race, trapped and betrayed in the wilderness of the

world." Indeed, Bierce's viev/ of the world was dark, and

all of his stories illustrate this darkened vision. He

was influenced by determinism and very sensitive to the

"vast impersonal forces in nature which reduced man to

the status of a puppet jerked by the strings of chance."

This belief resulted in a persistent theme running through

his work: man's helplessness in the face of an inevitable

fate. Since Bierce so often shows the bitter contrast be­

tween a character's aspirations and the harsh reality,

especially in war, that reduces man to an almost animal

level and makes existence meaningless, death becomes a

symbol of "life's final inanity." Tlius suicide becomes

man's final desperate gesture against the forces that con­

trol his fate.

As Danforth Ross points out, most naturalistic

writers sought in their stories to show "that man is not

•'- Stuart C. Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce: A Study in Polarity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), pp. 30, 19.

Woodruff, The Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, p. 32.

88

merely influenced by environmental or hereditary forces 12

but is determined by them." This attitude is clearly

shown in several stories of this study. In Dreiser's

"Typhoon" Ida is never condemned for her actions; indeed

she never seems to ask herself if she has done wrong.

She is shown as a victim of circumstances—her strict up­

bringing and the moral strictures of a puritanical society

As Ray B. West states, according to Dreiser, Ida Zobel is

•'the result of a home environment which has withheld her

from life, so that when she faces its risks and is be­

trayed, it is the society which has provided such an en-

13

vironment which is to blame." Her suicide is almost in­

evitable, according to such a concept. Dreiser omits any

sense of individual responsibility in his story. Society,

according to Dreiser, is responsible for Ida's suicide,

because it has given her a false set of values and ideals

with which to face the harsh realities of life. In

Dreiser's other story, "The Lost Phoebe," there is also

social commentary in the portrayal of the drab conditions

of the farm, perhaps implying why the children left and

felt no close ties with their family because of this drab

environment. Old Henry's misfortune also is the result

of a physical force—his senility. The lack of

12 Ross, The American Short Story, p. 25.

13 ^Ray B. West, The Short Story m America, Second Edition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), p. 38.

PQ

understanding from society contributes to his degeneration

and his suicide.

Sherwood TVnderson, influenced by naturalism and

always concerned with the conflict between nature and the

world of power, wealth, and religion, uses the suicide of

May Edgley in "Unused" to portray the victory of that

14 world over the natural impulses of human beings. When

May's attempt to communicate a part of her longing to an­

other human being is so mistaken, by both the young man

and the village society, her frustration is complete.

Suicide seems the only answer to her sense of life's fu­

tility. Anderson's condemnation of a society's moral con­

ventions is graphically illustrated by May's suicide.

Hazel Morse in "Big Blonde"' is also trapped by her

environment. Dorothy Parker shows in this story the empti­

ness of the lives of her characters in an environment

consisting solely of drinking, eating, and casual love-

making. Hazel, caught in this milieu, prepared for no

other kind of life and not really perceptive enough to

realize that any other sort of life exists, only knows

that her own life is empty, meaningless, and dreary. Miss

Parker shows Hazel's attempted suicide as the only means

she knows to escape such dreariness. As Danforth Ross has

l^Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Liter­ary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 244.

90

observed, there is a naturalistic element in the story in

the "social desert in which the characters live.""^^ Hazel

is doomed to this meaningless existence by the forces of

her environment.

Crane's Maggie also is a victim of circumstances.

Several critics have pointed out that Crane, in inscrip­

tions for the 1893 Maggie, stated, "For it tries to show

that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and

frequently shapes lives regardless." Surely at least

one of Crane's purposes in depicting Maggie's destruction

was to point out how the circumstances of her slum exist­

ence and brut.al treatment by others pushed Maggie to her

eventual suicide. As William T. Lenehan says, "Each step

toward suicide seems determined by the characters who

17 represent forces m her society. . . . " Some critics,

however, suggest that Crane's purpose extends beyond the

simple naturalistic view that man is a victim of

"I cz

Ross, The American Short Story, p. 39.

Joseph X. Brennan, "Ironic and Symbolic Struc­ture in Crane's 'Maggie,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XVI (1962), p. 315; Max Westbrook, "Stephen Crane's Social Ethic," American Quarterly, XIV (1962), p. 587; and Lar-zer Ziff, "Stephen Crane's 'Maggie' and Darwinism," American Quarterly, XVI (1964), p. 183.

17 . William T. Lenehan, "The Failure of Naturalistic

Techniques in Stephen Crane's 'Maggie,'" Stephen Crane's 'Maggie': Text and Context, ed. by Maurice Bassan (Bel­mont, California: Wadsworth, 1966), p. 172.

circumstances and has no control over his own destiny.

This larger view is best summed up by Donald Pizer:

The novel is not so much about the slums as a physical reality as about what people believe in the slums and how their beliefs are both false to their experience and yet function as operational forces in their lives.18

Illustrative of this view is the fact that the people in

Maggie's life accept conventional moral standards even

though they sometimes do not apply to their situations.

These conventions, such as the ideas that the home is a

center of virtue and that respectability is a primary

moral goal, seem strangely out of place in the tenements

of the Bowery. Maggie's home has been nothing but squa­

lor, drunkenness, and brutality; and she has seen no re­

spectability displayed by her mother. Yet Maggie's mis­

step brings forth the same response that a conventional

home would supposedly have. Jimmie sees no connection be­

tween his own immorality and Maggie's fall. Thus, Maggie

is the victim "not so much of the blind impersonal force

of her environment as of the inadequate morality of the

19 unreal world view rooted in perverse pride and vanity."

18 Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nine­

teenth Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), p. 111.

19 James B. Colvert, ••Crane's Image of Man,"

Stephen Crane's 'Maggie'" Text and Context, ed. by Mau­rice Bassan (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1966), p. 138.

92

All the characters suffer from illusions, usually pro­

duced by vanity or pride. Mary Johnson refuses to see

herself as the brutal alcoholic she is and fancies her­

self as a righteous mother. Jiiranie sees his courage as

being of heroic proportions, even though his bluster never

amounts to anything. Even Maggie has illusions of escap­

ing into a world of romance and glamour. These illusions

account in part for Maggie's downfall, and when Maggie

realizes that her romantic dream is only illusion, she

is driven to despair and suicide. Maggie is thus at the

same time Crane's view of the force of environment on

human beings and also his condemnation of the falsity and

destructiveness of certain moral codes—both views illus­

trated by Maggie's degradation and suicide.

Although Willa Gather treats the character of Paul

in "Paul's Case" with both sympathy and irony, the influ­

ence of environment in his destruction is predominant.

The environment which Paul found so intolerable, the com­

mercial and industrial life of a city, was hated also by

Willa Gather. She is sympathetic toward Paul's love of

beauty at all costs but she also reveals him as a shallow

person, since Paul never thinks "to persevere in the course

20 that would bring him the kind of life he wants. •' Ross

20 , John H. Randall, The Landscape and the Looking

Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 30.

93

suggests that Gather's philosophy behind the story is de­

terministic and her purpose for Paul's suicide could very

well reflect this determinism. His suicide seems to be

both a symbol of his defeat by the forces of an intolerant

society and his final gesture of defiance against such

society.

In the introduction to Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton,

referring to her story, writes:

. . . for I had felt . . . that the theme of my tale was not one on which many variations could be played. It must be treated as starkly and sum­marily as life had always presented itself to my protagonists; any attempt to elaborate and com­plicate their sentiments would necessarily have falsified the whole. They were, in truth, these figures, my granite outcroppings; but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articu­late. 22

This close alliance of her characters and their environ­

ment surely at least points to Mrs. Wharton's purpose in

Ethan Frome.

Although at least two critics have considered

Ethan a weak, passive man who does "nothing by moral elec-

23 24 tion" and expresses a "negation of life, •' there seems

21 Ross, The American Short Story, p. 29.

22 Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. vi.

23 Lionel Trilling, "The Morality of Inertia,'•

Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engle-wood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 143.

24 Kenneth Bernard, "Imagery and Symbolism in

•Ethan Frome,'" College English, XXIII (1961), p. 183.

94

more support in the story itself for the view of Ethan as

a character of promising, even heroic possibilities. The

impression Frome makes on the narrator from the beginning

of the story suggests an admirable character. His very

appearance suggests a ruin, but a majestic ruin. His

longing to be an engineer and his renewed interest in

scientific reading when the young engineer gives him books

connote a mind, though wasted, which still hungers for

knowledge. Miss Wharton makes clear that Ethan "had al­

ways been more sensitive than the people about him to the

25 appeal of natural beauty." Thus Ethan emerges as a

strong, sensitive man doomed by circumstances beyond his

control. And, as Blake Nevius points out, even though

Ethan is hemmed in by circumstances', it is Ethan's own

sense of responsibility "that blocks the last avenue of

26 escape and condemns him to a life of sterile expiation.'•

Ethan's sense of duty prevents him from running away from

Zeena, just as years before, it had prevented him from

forsaking his parents. His self-sacrifice adds up to a

waste, however, and when he tries to escape this futile

waste.

25 Wharton, Ethan Frome, p. 33.

^^Blake Nevius, "On 'Ethan Frome,'" Edith Wharton p^ Collection of Critical Essays, p. 132.

95

His very attempt to escape through suicide, in fact, had only doubled the bonds of his cap­tivity; for his crippled body only objectifies the warped state of his soul, now chained to the ruins of a tragic marriage and even more tragic love.^^

Thus, Mrs. Wharton uses the attempted suicide and its fail­

ure to illustrate starkly and poignantly the warping of

Ethan Frome, both in body and soul, a warping largely ac­

complished by the circumstances in which Ethan lives.

Two overly sentimental stories in this study also

blame environment and society at least partially for the

suicides of their victims. 0. Henry uses his double sui­

cide in "The Furnished Room" supposedly to show the irony

of fate and the cruel heartlessness of an uncaring world,

possibly represented by the slovenly landlady, her dreary

roominghouse, and her conniving unconcern for the misery

28

of the young man. The suicides of both the young girl

and the boy seem to show what happens to youth and inno­

cence in the "monstrous quicksand" and "ooze and slime'•

of a large city. Due to the excessive sentimentalism and

the sometimes maudlin tone, 0. Henry falls short of achiev­

ing his purpose. Although not as sentimental as 0. Henry's

story, Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" contains

^"^Joseph X. Brennan, "'Ethan Frome': Structure and Metaphor, •• Modern Fiction Studies, VII (1961), p. 355.

28 Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction, p. 97.

96

many melodramatic effects. Bret Harte ostensibly shows

the basic virtue in human nature, especially the sterling

qualities of characters often considered immoral by so­

ciety. His two suicides in this story illustrate this

theme. Mother Shipton's self-sacrifice shows a sudden

and unrealistic conversion of her character. Her motiva­

tion supposedly is solely for the prolongation of the

lives of the two young innocents. John Oakhurst, selfless

in his leadership, commits suicide only after he has done

all he can do for the others and when he realizes their

plight is hopeless. The excessive sentimentality of the

story and lack of credible motivation of characters de­

stroy much of the effectiveness of the theme Bret Harte is

stressing.

Melville's purpose in portraying Bartleby's sui­

cide is as ambiguous as Bartleby's motive in committing

suicide. The two are inextricably intertwined. Melville's

view of society and the universe, however, was a pessimis­

tic one at the time he wrote "Bartleby." Such previous

works as Moby Dick, Pierre, and "Benito Cereno" furnish

partial clues as to the significance of Bartleby's defiance

of our defeat by life. In these works, Melville views life

more or less as futile and meaningless. Therefore, it

seems logical to consider Bartleby within this same con­

text. Bartleby's death seems to signify a belief in the

97

sterility of life, an awful void, represented in the story

by the terrible blank walls of nothingness at which Bart­

leby stares until he eventually withdraws altogether into

death.

In "Indian Camp" Hemingway deals with the themes

running through the stories and sketches of In Our Time—

the cycle of life, childbirth, and death—and their recog­

nition by the young protagonist, Nick Adams. The suicide

in this story serves as a part of Nick's initiation into

life and its harshness, as it shows the violence, horror,

and unpredictability of death—and the irony that it is

the young Indian husband who dies, not his wife who has

been at the point of death in child labor for two days.

As Philip Young points out, this story begins a pattern

of evil and violence for Nick that is developed in the 29

rest of the Nick Adams stories. Certainly the suicide

forms a part of that pattern of evil and violence. Ross

suggests that Hemingway's stories test "man's spiritual

30 existence against the trapping forces" of an indifferent

universe. In "Indian Camp" the suicide serves the purpose

of showing that some, such as the Indian, cannot cope with

these forces and are crushed by them; but others, like

29 Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway, p. 32.

30 _ Ross, The American Short Story, p. 34.

98

Nick, are influenced by them but not defeated.

A criticism of society is at least implied in

"Daddy Deering" when the society to which Daddy Deering

has given so much of his time and energy finally ridicules,

ignores, and eventually scorns him. Also in this story,

however, Hamlin Garland shows a fate worse than death when

the old man, who had gloried in his great strength and en­

durance, becomes wasted and useless in body. Daddy's

death comes as a welcome release from a life made meaning­

less by his dwindled and crippled form. The tragedy of

Daddy is not that he dies but that he could not die before

he was so far past his prime.

In "The Burning," "Old Mortality," and "A Perfect

Day for Bananafish," the authors are censuring certain

types of societies. In "The Burning" Miss Welty shows the

death of Southern aristocracy in the hangings of Miss Theo

and Miss Myra. They epitomize Southern gentility, brutal­

ized and humiliated by the savage actions of the Union

soldiers. The dignified strength of Miss Theo and the

lady-like gentility of Miss Myra give a composite picture

of what the North destroyed. Miss Welty's censure seems

to encompass both the North and the South—the North for

its brutal savagery, the South for its impractical concept

of genteel womanhood. The romanticism of the South is

also criticized in "Old Mortality. •' Although the suicide

of Amy is buried in the past and no clear-cut explanation

99

can be given, some details indicate that society is largely

to blame for Amy's death. Amy's short life is spent in

rebellion against this society and its values—her esca­

pade to Mexico, her defiance of her father in matters of

dress, her disregard for her own health. Her dissatisfac­

tion with and defiance of the acceptable standards for

Southern belles find a final rebellion by her suicide.

Salinger, in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," is

criticizing another type of society, the modern material­

istic world. Although motivation for Seymour's suicide

is vague in the story, condemnation of Muriel, her mother,

and their values reflects Salinger's strictures on a ma­

terialistic society which allows no place in its scheme

for idealistic dreamers like Seymour. Such a world's total

lack of understanding and sympathy for those individuals

who do not conform to its superficial values and concerns

is responsible for the destruction of such individuals as

Seymour.

In conclusion, man's character in relation to his

surroundings and his relationships with other human be­

ings were to sum up his life. For the authors in this

study, this summation is often tragic, desperate, and hope­

less. As Frank O'Connor has pointed out in The Lonely

Voice, " . . . there is in the short story at its most char­

acteristic something we do not often find in the novel—

f

100

an intense awareness of human loneliness."" ''' It is this

terrible •'human loneliness" these authors have shown in

their studies of self-destruction.

31 , , Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of

the Short Story (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), p. 19.

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