George has learned to “take the backward view of life” and to “live and die in uncertainty” (Fussell, p.113). These new feelings for George make him, for the first time, feel extremely isolated from the rest of the world, and he longs to come close with some other humam. Helen White, who has been George’s love interest, has also matured to this point of womanhood. She, like George, longs to share her feelings of isolation from the world and to have George “feel the conscious change in her nature.” (p.236). After being at the fair for a while, Helen and George ascend a hill overlooking the Winesburg fair. It is this moment that George and Helen both lose their sense of isolation, and also experience the feelings that represent maturity in both men and women: The feeling of lonliness and isolation that had come to the Young man….was both broken and intensified by the Presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her. (p.241) In Anderson’s short story, “Death In The Woods”, the reader is introduced to a brief, yet another bold exploration of the things that “lie beneath the surface” of human lives. Like Windesburg, this story takes place in a small town, where people know very little about each other, even to the point where they don’t recognize faces. The story begins with the description of an old woman walking into town, through the woods. The kind of woman that “All country and small-town people have seen, but no one knows much about them.”(p.3). This statement, right from the start, presents a picture of an extreme isolation of lives. The feeling that even a woman of old age, who has probably spent a great time in this ...
