Brushing against one another, passing one another in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and hear voices, but it does not really matter—­they are disconnected, psychically lost.  Is this due to the particular circumstances of small-town America as Anderson saw it at the turn of the century?  Or does he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human condition which makes all of us bear the burden of loneliness?  Alice Hindman in the story “Adventure” turns her face to the wall and tries “to force herself to face the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”  Or especially in Winesburg?  Such impressions have been put in more general terms in Anderson’s only successful novel, Poor White: 

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls.  Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful.  Word of his activities is carried over the walls.

These “walls” of misunderstanding are only seldom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands”) or oppressive social arrangements (Kate Swift in “The Teacher.”) Misunderstanding, loneliness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as virtually a root condition, something deeply set in our natures.  Nor are these people, the grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at some point in their lives they have known desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship.  In all of them there was once something sweet, “like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards in Winesburg.”  Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a “truth” which turns out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but unable to.  Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the entire book.  “Words,” as the American writer Paula Fox has said, “are nets through which all truth escapes.”  Yet what do we have but words?

They want, these Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and festering.  Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley “tried to talk but could say nothing”; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing “his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.”