Theme of initiation in the select short stories of sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was a prolific, profound, provocative and perceptive writer of short stories. In the recent decades, however, there has been a revival of considerable scholarly critical interest in his life and all that he wrote including his writings as writer of advertising copy for different advertising companies. He is recognized as one of the really important and significant creative writers of the first few decades of the 20th century. Further, it is acknowledged that he “remained a profound, provocative and perceptive writer to the end, and that he has much to say” to the present time. The short story became the most popular of fictional forms at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in America. Almost every important writer of fiction during the first half of the century- Scott Fitzerald, Earnest Hemingway, William Faulkner and others among them handled this form of short fiction with distinction, exploring and revealing its possibilities to give expression to contemporary life and sensibility. Frank O Connor, who had an acute sense of national values, was led on to declare way back in 1963 that “the Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form”. The contribution of Sherwood Anderson to this phenomenal development was by no means ordinary and has influence on other writers of short stories among his immediate contemporaries and those of the newer generations. “Anderson reshaped the American short story, making it his own, and at the same time prepared the ground work for the revolutionary writers who would follow them”.

Anderson is more interested in the inner life than in anything else. His remarkable ability to get close to ordinary life, look deep into buried lives, probe beneath the dark surface of life to get at its essence, and transform his perceptions into memorable fictional art continue ever before in his later stories. These stories are all about the formation of one character, young George Willard, the much sought after newspaperman of Winesburg. Therefore attention is naturally directed on him and the different stages of his growth mental, moral and physical from boyhood to adulthood, as it takes place during his contact or encounter with a number of people-men and women, young and old alike in the small town Winesburg.

The stories considered and linked thematically together are I Want to know Why and I’ am a Fool, all of which are regarded as among Anderson's major post Winesburg stories are said to be based on Anderson's memories of his own youth.

The young woman of the story who is not given a name, could be easily dubbed as a pervert if one did not know more about her plight with sympathy the time of his confessional narration he is close to his adulthood, no longer the adolescent of the days of the experience he recounts. In his attempt to give an authentic feel of his state of mind when he went through the unsetting experience, and “to adopt the mask of a lovesick youth”, he uses an idiom and style of narration more forced, deliberately and consciously adolescent than in I Want to Know Why. It is as if he deliberately tries to inject significance into the narrative. Therefore his success is only moderate.