Mobile Audio Books Club

A major theme that was experimented with in The Ballad of Sad Café by Carson McCullers and during the class discussion was the concept of love. As McCullers makes it difficult for the reader to grasp her abstract definition of love, the reader can only interpret his/her own definition based on the relationships between the three major characters associated with the love triangle: Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon (the hunchback), and Marvin Macy. Based on the discussion, I recall two major interpretations: that of sexual love which the class as a whole agreed upon to be a plausible interpretation, and that of brotherly love which Kristen Tanner particularly brought up and was founded to be a sound interpretation as well.

It is the way that McCullers chooses to conclude her novella that best supports the latter of the two interpretations. The Twelve Mortal Men was a short bit that described a chain gang of twelve criminals who work gruelingly and end up joyously singing as they do so. In contrast to the rest of the story that depicts unrequited love, the chain gang represents brotherly love that is answered, “all day there is the sound of picks striking the clay earth, hard sunlight, smell of sweat…one dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, like a question…soon the whole gang will be singing” (McCullers 70). It is also significant that the twelve men in the chain gang consist of seven black men and five white men for it shows that it is most favorable for brotherly love to overcome even a segregated south in times of hardship. And, when such a conclusion is read, it is more understandable to comprehend that if a brotherly love existed between the three main characters in the love triangle, then the destruction of the café would have been prevented. Furthermore, this alludes to the concept that a powerful brotherly love has harmonious properties. The way that each of the three characters played the role of “the lover” and was spontaneously bonded to their “beloved” enforces this; if only the love was mutual.

Besides the actual content of The Twelve Mortal Men, the fact that it was a independent from the novella’s plot elicits a sad truth that life goes on. During the discussion two passages were mentioned: one included information of an entire family dying from eating rotten meat, and the other discussed the little value of human life. The former passage reveals that a disturbance of brotherly love (the arrival of Marvin Macy) was the cause of such a sudden and tragic event, while the latter passage continues to say that is the café, where a congregation of people socializing assumes brotherly love, serves as the solution to the little worth of life. Both these cases support an obvious conclusion, it is for the better that brotherly love exist and thrive in this world.

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Filed under: Audio Books on September 22nd, 2009