People from Bloomington Literary Elements

Short Story Collection

A semi-fictional version of Bloomington, Indiana in the late 1970s as seen through the eyes of a native of Indonesian temporarily living there.

All the stories in this collection feature a first-person narrator delivering a story that is a deeply voyeuristic observation about the actions of others, for the most part.

The stories contained within the collection present a curious commingling of a light tone charged with a perverse sort of optimism within storylines operating under a pervasively pessimistic mood.

Protagonists: the narrators. Antagonist: Societal interaction

The conflict at the heart of each of these stories is between an isolated and alienated narrator who is in one way or another sucked into social interaction with outsiders, usually strangers.

One notable feature of this collection is the universal absence of an explicit transformative moment. The endings of the stories are distinctly anti-climactic and usually take the form of a conclusion in which nothing of great significance has changed from the beginning.

The opening lines of the opening paragraph of the opening story in the collection is description of the specific point within the neighborhood in which the story will play out. This focus on setting which situates an overarching importance to place foreshadows what will become a recurring factor in every story that follows.

The endings of most of the stories are examples of understatement. The concluding line of “The Family M” is an especially illuminating example: “And I stay here, stay alone.”

The author has openly acknowledged the influence of American writer Nathanael Hawthorne. This influence is noted in the allusive name of one of the collections most memorable characters, Hester Price. The allusion is to Hester Prynne, the notorious heroine of Hawthorne’s signature work, The Scarlet Letter.

The physical description of characters is not usually an element that creates a distinction between the stories, except when this descriptive imagery traverses into the grotesque. One such example is the narrator’s description of Joshua Karabish, the title character of the story: “His bulging head, his eyes that always seemed to be about to pop out of their nests, and his mouth that seemed unable to close, coupled with the way he said, and what he said, caused me not to have the heart to stay away from him.”

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All the stories parallel each other in the structural quality of being first-person observations tinged with a voyeuristic quality in which the isolation of the narrator brings torment down upon themselves.

The title of the book can be interpreted as a metonymic phrase meaning “Americans.” In this sense, the “people from Bloomington” are those from a typical, average middle-American city which is allegorically supposed to represent a broad overview of Americana.

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