The Paperhanger
Kasey Williams
Professor Foster
ENG 1010
14 Oct 2013
Disintegrating Religion “The Paperhanger” is a dark tale of the disappearance of a child, the resultant disintegration first of her parents’ marriage and then of their lives, and of a shocking miracle engineered by the paperhanger, a strange dispassionate man. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who unfolds his yarn with consummate skill and a portentousness that vacillates between grim, almost biblical, wisdom and brutal irony. The narrative opens with the assertion that the vanishing of the child “was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now” and proceeds to detail the events that immediately preceded the child’s disappearance and the actions of the doctor, his wife, the authorities, and the paperhanger after the child vanishes. (72). In the first pages, the doctor’s wife quarrels with the paperhanger on the building site of a mansion being built for her and her husband. The child, Zeineb, is innocently playing with the paperhanger’s long flaxen hair as the mother assails him for his shoddy work and for overcharging her. The paperhanger’s insolent and sexually provocative response enrages the doctor’s wife, and she verbally abuses him, whirls on her heels, and marches out of the house to her silver Mercedes. When she calls for her daughter to join her, there is no response. She goes back into the house and demands to know where her daughter is. No one knows; but led by the paperhanger, the workers search the house and all of the woods behind the house. In William Gay’s story, the people slowly start to fade away. Gay first starts with the daughter of the doctor and the doctor’s wife, Zeineb, as she vanishes in broad daylight. Deeper into the story the doctor starts to disintegrate. The doctor’s practice fell into ruin, and he packed things of importance and others at random into the Lexus and left in the middle of the night. The wife never hears from
Professor Foster
ENG 1010
14 Oct 2013
Disintegrating Religion “The Paperhanger” is a dark tale of the disappearance of a child, the resultant disintegration first of her parents’ marriage and then of their lives, and of a shocking miracle engineered by the paperhanger, a strange dispassionate man. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who unfolds his yarn with consummate skill and a portentousness that vacillates between grim, almost biblical, wisdom and brutal irony. The narrative opens with the assertion that the vanishing of the child “was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now” and proceeds to detail the events that immediately preceded the child’s disappearance and the actions of the doctor, his wife, the authorities, and the paperhanger after the child vanishes. (72). In the first pages, the doctor’s wife quarrels with the paperhanger on the building site of a mansion being built for her and her husband. The child, Zeineb, is innocently playing with the paperhanger’s long flaxen hair as the mother assails him for his shoddy work and for overcharging her. The paperhanger’s insolent and sexually provocative response enrages the doctor’s wife, and she verbally abuses him, whirls on her heels, and marches out of the house to her silver Mercedes. When she calls for her daughter to join her, there is no response. She goes back into the house and demands to know where her daughter is. No one knows; but led by the paperhanger, the workers search the house and all of the woods behind the house. In William Gay’s story, the people slowly start to fade away. Gay first starts with the daughter of the doctor and the doctor’s wife, Zeineb, as she vanishes in broad daylight. Deeper into the story the doctor starts to disintegrate. The doctor’s practice fell into ruin, and he packed things of importance and others at random into the Lexus and left in the middle of the night. The wife never hears from