Hands

The majority of the action in “Hands” takes place within a flashback, or a scene that takes place before the main setting of the story. Although the story itself takes place over the course of just a few hours on Wing Biddlebaum’s veranda in Winesburg, almost nothing happens during those hours. Taken literally, the story is entirely anticlimactic: Wing Biddlebaum waits for a visitor who never arrives, eats some honey on bread for supper, and then prepares for bed. However, this closed sequence of events is interrupted by several flashbacks, detailing anywhere from a few weeks to several months’ worth of conversations between Wing Biddlebaum and George Willard. These conversations are a series of unclear fragments, disconnected from setting and linear time.

Even the climax of the story happens 20 years before the events themselves, when Wing Biddlebaum went by the name Adolph Myers and was driven out of Pennsylvania. Rather than using a traditional plot structure in which cause and effect clearly define the rising and falling action, Anderson deliberately and repeatedly violates the expectations of time and plot by using flashbacks to illustrate how Wing Biddlebaum’s middle-age isolation is defined by a singular event in the past. His current life is static and unchanging between the moments he shares with George Willard, devoid of climaxes, growth, and fulfilment of any kind, in direct contrast to the bright, passionate, affectionate young man Wing Biddlebaum once was.

When Wing Biddlebaum criticizes George Willard for his “inclination to be alone and to dream” despite being “afraid of dreams” (5), these shortcomings are not George Willard’s but Wing Biddlebaum’s own. Wing Biddlebaum is the one afraid of dreams because they are what caused his exile: “In his bed at night [a boy] imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (7). The irony of dreams causing Wing Biddlebaum’s tragedy is that his affection for his students was “part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds” (7). This is an example of irony both in the modern sense of a reversal of the expected result—Adolph Myers was such a good teacher, he inspired students not to doubt their dreams, leading to the allegation of wrongdoing—and also the technique of Greek tragedy, in which the full significance of a character’s words are known to the audience but not the speaker.

“Hands” contains a significant amount of repetition, including the use of the full names “Wing Biddlebaum” and “George Willard.” Five consecutive paragraphs in the middle of the story, for example, begin with the full name of the story’s main character: “On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point home. […] Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. […] Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. […] Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at George Willard. […] With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his feet” (5-6). Repeating a word many times can create a feeling of meaninglessness. In psychology, this is known as “semantic satiation” and is a kind of mental fatigue. The use of full names throughout the story creates both semantic satiation—the names themselves become meaningless—as well as an unnatural cadence by placing emphasis in the “wrong” areas of the story, which becomes disorienting.