Grotesques

Winesburg, Ohio can be classified as a collection of short stories. The novel takes place in the fictional town in Ohio called Winesburg. The story doesn’t really have a main character. The closest character that resembles a main character is George Willard. George Willard is a reporter for a local newspaper. The novel begins with a prologue where an unnamed man is obsessed with his theory of grotesques. As he is sleeping, he sees everyone that he has ever met as grotesques in his dreams. After waking up from this sleep, this man writes down everything he saw and rambles on for hundreds of pages in a book called The Book of Grotesques. The old man claims that there are numerous “beautiful” truths in this world and that all of them are valid. The problem arises when someone tries to live by only one truth. This makes them distorted and transforms them into grotesques. This prologue is what connects all the different stories in the novel even though the stories sometimes seem to have no relation to each other. Every single story in the novel revolves around a character who is a grotesque because they only believe in one truth. An example is the story revolving around Wash Williams. A fat and unattractive man, he tells George of his past. He claims that he was handsome and lean in the old days when he was married to his wife. But he found out that she was cheating on him so he left her and went to a different town. One day, his mother in law invited both him and her daughter to her house. Thinking that his wife was going to apologize, he reluctantly decided to go to his mother in law’s house. When he was there, he found out that his wife and her mother conceived a despicable plan of trying to make him forgive his wife by using sex as a tool. This made him infuriated as he then believed that all women were despicable. From that moment on, he referred to all women as “bitches”. This is the one “truth” that he decided to believe in and it made him into a grotesque as he became obese and anti social. But let’s examine the “truth” that the unnamed author talks about in the prologue. He claims that there are many different truths that are all legitimate and people only become grotesques if and only if they only believe in one truth.  Does that mean if Wash had believed in another truth in conjunction with the one that claims all women are despicable he would have been not become a grotesque? I think that the definition of truth that is described in the prologue is too vague to determine the answer to this question. What happens if Wash Williams believes in two completely different but both “negative” truths?  In my opinion, Wash Williams would have still become a grotesque even if the truths were completely different.