The sum of the parts of the vignettes of the citizens of Winesburg, Ohio is greater than the entire novel. Winesburg is also just one city in all of Ohio, which is one of many states in the United States. This magnification is at the heart of the novel, in which synecdoche is the primary lens through which Sherwood Anderson allows us to consider the world. grotesque. This narrow opening of perception does not compromise full characterization, but instead forces the reader to look for subtle connections within and across the sketches. The opening story, “Hands,” launches the titular synecdochic motif whose pairings Anderson deploys systematically and symmetrically. Excluding the final short story, "Departure", and the prologue "The Book of the Grotesque", the opening story completes the final story. Within this diptych and throughout the other pieces, Anderson inserts the embodied symbol of human connection, the hand, into a matrix of binaries and hidden connections. It outlines the many antithetical uses of the hand (for example, both as a formal farewell handshake and as a lover's caress) and reveals the gesticulative associations between seemingly disparate characters. Even if we can only glimpse a character's hand, by tracing the antitheses and parallels we can enlarge that part into a life-size portrait, just as we come to understand a city by all its citizens, a state by all its cities, and a country from all its states. And just as the United States encompasses neither just Ohio nor just Oregon, but the entire union, so the hand embodies neither exclusively intimacy nor exclusively alienation, but the entire spectrum of human contact. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I will begin by examining what I find to be the crux of the novel's conflict, the paradoxical unfolding of hands within the stories. The paradox presents a state of being that is impossible or illogical for the hand, but which nevertheless exists. Anderson suggests the importance of the paradox by showing Wing Biddlebaum "rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the street" (5). The gesture has little to do with his vision at the moment, but suggests that the reader looks both ways while reading the book and exercises his depth perception. We note the disconcerting mix of human emotions beneath the surface of a simple handshake: “He held out his hand as if to greet the younger man and then withdrew it awkwardly” (141). The relationship between the two men, that of a doctor greeting the son of a deceased patient, is summed up by the handshake, a formalized mode of greeting in a situation that requires the tact of a more informal tactility. The ambivalence a person encounters when thrust into society, of desiring intimacy but fearing closeness, is the central motivation of the grotesque, as expressed by an eighteen-year-old George Willard, who later retracts his vows with angry, forced detachment : «He longs with all his heart to get close to some other human being, to touch someone with his hands, to be touched by the hand of another. Above all, he wants understanding” (145). But such understanding is difficult when paradoxes reveal their irreconcilable and incomprehensible origins. Insecure about his baldness, Wing's hands play futilely on his "bare white forehead as if arranging a mass of tangled curls" (5). is" is indicative of Wing's attempts to create connections or proclaim presence where none exists. Likewise confusing is his means of articulation: "The thin expressive fingers, always active, always striving to hide in his pockets or behind hisback, they stepped forward and became the pistons of his expressive machine" (6). Although his words are emphasized through gesticulation, the hands visually draw attention away from the verbal meaning. His humanity can be revealed more clearly through his gestures , but is also reduced by robotic “piston rod” associations. Going beyond the paradox, contradictions play a key role in defining strictly alternative operations of the hand. Created through the juxtaposition of two opposing uses of the hand, they show the multidimensionality of the hand which might escape notice if seen as an isolated instance. Wing, like the teacher Adolph Myers, touches his students with communicative love: In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were part of the master's efforts to bring a dream into young minds. With the caress he had between his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is widespread, not centralized. (8) Three paragraphs later, the father of one of the students reverses Myers' soft touch with his "hard knuckles" while beating him. If its force is also diffusion, it is dissipation and destruction: «Screaming in dismay, the children ran here and there like disturbed insects» (8). The violent is once again combined with the nourishing in the operations of modifying utilitarian objects. An angry mob of men with "lanterns in their hands" carries mundane objects with poison, as does the man with a "rope in his hand" (9). In the present, Wing uses a knife, not even named in the passage, to "cut slices of bread and spread honey on them" (9). Lanterns and ropes as instruments of death and a knife as an aid to sustenance, each made so by the intent of the controlling hands, encapsulates the contradictory range of the hand that inevitably seeks both life and death, contact and alienation. How the Hand Works figures as an agent of these conflicting goals between the characters "We are told that "[T]he story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself" and, indeed, comparable details of seemingly unique gestures abound throughout Winesburg, Ohio. of a hand on the shoulder recurs among characters, but with different intentions In "The Thinker," Helen places "her hand on Seth's shoulder" in an "act of pure affection and sharp remorse" (82). ” George interprets Helen's shoulder touch as an advanced state of hand-holding: “In the darkness he took her hand and as she came closer he put his hand on her shoulder” (149). But his and Helen's affection is borne not out of pure affection, but out of an insecurity of anonymous alienation, where neither the lover nor the emotion are named: "'I came to this lonely place and here is this other one.' , was the substance of the thing felt" (149). The wing is the progenitor of the shoulder motif, "caressing the shoulders of boys" as a schoolmaster in his "effort to bring a dream into young minds" (9). In a moment of blissful oblivion from his manual torment, he repeats the accompanying verbal and physical lesson with George: "For once he forgot his hands. Slowly they slipped out and rested on George Willard's shoulders. "You must try to forget all that that you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream.” more. The socially fluent members of Winesburg are equally lonely. He shrinks from touching George, remembering his past: "With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum jumped up and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets" (7 In "). The Thinker,” Seth Richmond fantasizes about an idyllic summer scene with Helen White, “her hand in his hand” (81). Then, when he returns with her to the"" (152).