George Willard

     George Willard is a very fascinating character in Winesburg, Ohio.  Anderson uses George to do a large number of things in this story, first, in a sense; George's involvement makes the story into a Bildungsroman, a story about the development/maturation of a character.  George seems to defy what many of the themes that the rest of the novel attempts to portray, in a novel about the creation and existence of grotesques, he remains unharmed.  Also, Anderson introduces speculation that George is the writer at the beginning of the novel.

     George develops a burgeoning ability to dream, an ability that he apparently lacks in the beginning of the novel, according to Wing.  Wing tells George that he must learn to dream, a skill, which, by the end of the novel he appears to have gained.  At the end of "Departure" he is thinking not of serious things that relate to his future, but of little things, dreams.  George also experiences the typical adolescent feelings.  He is eager for sex, but, after actually experiencing it with Louise Trunnion, George feels both pride and guilt, separating the act from the person he did it with.  But as time goes on and his mother dies, George matures, which can be seen especially in "Sophistication."  In "Sophistication" George finally makes it into adulthood, not through any particular action or rite of passage, but through the realization that he is isolated and he "sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village."  He comes to adulthood by realizing certain things about society that everyone must at some point come to understand, and come to reflect on their life. 

     George is not only surrounded by grotesques in Winesburg, he is often their sole connection to other people, and is one of the few things outside of common themes and location that link the separate stories in the novel together, and actually make it, well, a novel.  He appears in almost every story, “Tandy” being an obvious exception, among others.  Oftentimes, George is the only character that others will speak to.  Wing Biddlebaum, for example refrains from speaking to most anyone, but feels a sense of release when he speaks to George.  George causes other characters to reveal what it is exactly that makes them grotesque, whereas without his involvement they would have remained hidden, or at least not explicitly shown. 

     Anderson allows for speculation in who exactly the old writer at the beginning of the novel really is by leaving him nameless.  While reading the book, I went back and forth, but my opinion at the end is that George really is the writer.  Like the writer, George is not a grotesque, one of the extremely few examples of such in the book, and while the young George does this through childhood and learning to dream, the old man does so through a young thing inside of him, both doing so through youth.  Also, George is the connection between all the characters, and he seems well poised to be able to write about them convincingly.  George is repeatedly shown to get information from people that they wouldn’t normally give out, and to talk to people that don’t normally talk.  He becomes capable of dreaming.  By “Sophistication,” George begins “to think of people in the town where he had lived with something like reverence.”  He starts to appreciate their grotesqueness.