Thursday, May 15, 2008

Nothingness

These paintings exemplify the sense of loneliness and nothingness that is embodied in the two pieces that we read in class. Both pieces of art depict experienced people who seem to have a sense of isolation, the same type of person described in the two short stories. Both paintings take place in the daytime, and the time of day plays a significant role in the mood of the piece. “Morning Sun” presumably takes place in the morning, and the woman depicted seems eager to embrace the new day because she is looking boldly straight out the window rather than down, but the woman still seems somewhat depressed, perhaps due to loneliness or to her old age. “Sunday” takes place in what looks like an old-fashioned town, vacated except for one man sitting in front of an empty building. One can speculate that this man is one of the few in the town not at church, or that he had returned to a long abandoned hometown to muse over some distant, saddening memories. Either way, the painting has a sense of loss, and the man seems cut off from human contact by a lack of understanding, or set apart by his comprehension of “nothingness”.
The paintings embody the sense in the stories that at some level, the people are isolated and introspective. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, the old man sits alone at the table drinking, and is further separated from others by his deafness. The soldier in the other story is set apart by his experiences in war and his simple inability to relate to anybody else, despite their efforts and his continued contact with them. In the paintings, the characters are not isolated by communication barriers, rather by the fact that there is only one person in each painting. They literally have nobody to communicate with, but in the end that creates the same problem as the one that the characters in the short stories have. Left alone, they perceive only a feeling of nothingness. The interesting thing is that this feeling comes with experience in both stories and supposedly both paintings. While negative on the surface, the artists portray the feeling of nothingness as a symbol of wisdom.
-Robert Kramer

1 comment:

Jennifer Lee said...

I think your argument about the nothingness portrayed in both the painting and the story is a great connection. In "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," there are "nadas" that replace words in the Lord's Prayer, and in Spanish "nada" literally means nothing. But I also saw the same nothingness in "Sunday" in that there was no activity in the town except for a man sitting on the curb. Since we can't see inside the cafe because it's painted black, viewers get a sense of emptiness.

:D