![]() In this respect, Jackson’s fictional world resembles those of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. A character may then discover parts that contradict a chosen order or that attract one away from the apparent order, but one can never affirm the absolute superiority of one ordering to another. For Jackson, reality is so complex and mysterious that one inevitably only orders part of it. It is rarely clear that her characters discover or lose their grasp of reality rather, they form ideas of reality that are more or less moral and more or less functional. Although it is tempting to say that her main theme is the difference between appearance and reality, such a statement is misleading, for she seems to see reality as Herman Melville’s Ishmael comes to see it, as a mirror of the perceiving soul. Often, a change in a character’s perspective leads to anxiety, terror, neurosis, or even a loss of identity. ![]() Jackson seems especially interested in how characters order their worlds and how they perceive themselves in the world. Shirley Jackson’s (Decem– August 8, 1965) stories seem to center on a single concern: Almost every story is about a protagonist’s discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of circumstances or the world. ![]()
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