The sum of the parts of the vignettes of the people of Winesburg, Ohio is greater than the whole novel. Winesburg, too, is 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 prism through which Sherwood Anderson allows us to view the grotesque. This narrow opening of perception does not compromise full characterization, but rather requires the reader to look for subtle connections within and across the sketches. The opening story, “Hands,” launches the titular synecdoche motif which Anderson pairs systematically and symmetrically deploy. Disregarding the final short story, "The Departure", and the prologue "The Book of the Grotesque", the opening story completes the final story. In this diptych and the other pieces, Anderson feeds the embodied symbol of human connection, the hand, into a matrix of binary, hidden connections. It describes 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 ostensibly disparate characters. Even if we only see the hand of a character, by tracing its antitheses and parallels, we can enlarge this part to make a life-size portrait, just as we understand a city by all its citizens, a state by all its cities and a country through all its states. And just as the United States includes neither Ohio nor Oregon, but the entire Union, 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay I'll begin by examining what I find at the heart of the novel's conflict, the paradoxical deployments of hands in the stories. The paradox presents a state of being that is impossible or illogical for the hand, but exists nonetheless. Anderson makes us understand the importance of the paradox by showing Wing Biddlebaum “rubbing his hands and looking up and down the road” (5). The gesture has little to do with his vision at the moment, but suggests that the reader is looking equally at both sides as he reads the book and exercises his depth perception. We note the confusing mix of human emotion beneath the surface of a simple handshake: “He held out his hand as if to greet the younger man, then clumsily withdrew it” (141). The relationship between the two men, that of a doctor greeting the son of a deceased patient, boils down to the handshake, a formalized mode of greeting in a situation that requires the tact of a more informal tactility. The ambivalence that characterizes a person when immersed in society, desiring privacy but fearing proximity, is the central motivation of the grotesques, expressed by eighteen-year-old George Willard, who later returns to his wishes with a forced and angry distance: “With all his heart, he wants to get closer to another human being, to touch someone with his hands, to be touched by the hand of another.” Above all, he wants to understand” (145 ), But such understanding is difficult when the paradoxes reveal their irreconcilable and incomprehensible origins. Uncertain of his baldness, Wing's hands play uselessly on his "white and bare forehead as if to arrange a pile of tangled locks" (5). "is" is indicative of Wing's attempts to create connections or proclaim a presence where none exists. His means of articulation are equally confusing: "The thin, expressive fingers, always active,always striving to hide in his pockets or behind his back, came out and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression" (6). Although his words are emphasized by gesticulation, the hands visually divert the attention of the verbal meaning. His humanity is perhaps most clearly revealed through his gestures, but it is also reduced by the robotic associations of “piston rods”. Beyond the paradox, contradictions play a key role in the definition. of strictly alternative hand operations Created by the juxtaposition of two opposing uses of the hand, they highlight the multidimensionality of the hand which could go unnoticed if it were considered as isolated examples. Wing, in the role of the master. of school Adolph Myers, touches his students with an infectious love: In a certain way, the voice and the hands, the caresses on the shoulders and the touch of the hair were part of the schoolmaster's efforts to transmit a dream in young minds. Through the caress he had in his fingers, he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffuse and not centralized. (8) Three paragraphs later, the father of one of the students reverses Myers' gentle touch with his "hard knuckles" as he beats him. If its force is also that of diffusion, it is a dissipation of destruction: “Screaming in dismay, the children ran here and there like disturbed insects” (8). The violent is once again associated with the nourishing in the operations of modification of utilitarian objects. A crowd of angry men with “lanterns in their hands” carry mundane objects with venom, just like the man with a “rope in their hands” (9). In the present day, Wing uses a knife, whose name is not even mentioned in the passage, to "cut slices of bread and spread honey on them" (9). The lanterns and ropes as instruments of death and the knife as aid to sustenance, each thus created by the intention of the hands that control them, encapsulate the contradictory range of the hand as inevitably seeking both life and death, contact and alienation. 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 alone,” and, indeed, comparable details of supposedly unique gestures abound throughout Winesburg, Ohio. with a hand on a shoulder returns among the characters, but with different intentions. In “The Thinker,” Helen places “her hand on Seth’s shoulder” in an “act of pure affection and cutting regret” (82). " George considers the touch of Helene's shoulder to be an advanced state of hand-holding: "In the darkness he took her hand and when she came closer, placed a hand on his shoulder" (149). But his affection and that of Helene are carried not by pure affection, but by an insecurity of anonymous alienation, where neither the lover nor the emotion are named: "'I came to this solitary place and here is this other', such was the substance of the thing felt” (149) Wing is the progenitor of the shoulder motif, “stroking the boys' shoulders” as a schoolmaster in his “effort to carry a dream.” in young minds” (9) In a moment of blissful forgetfulness of his manual torment, he repeats the accompanying verbal and physical lesson with George: “For once he forgot the hands. Slowly, they flew away and landed on George Willard's shoulders. “You must try to forget everything you have learned,” said the old man. "You have to start dreaming" (8). Although Wing is an outcast anyway, his shared tendencies with others imply that either he is not as alone as he believes, or this other, more members socially"." (152).