Talk:The Ballad of the Sad Café

This novella, although mainly about sexual confusion and frustrated love, has a deeper aspect to it. It is almost scriptural in it's depiction of the material world as a place of infinite conflict and invalidity. The "coda" at the novella's conclusion points to the fact that little good can come from the experience of material life, that nothing here has grown....that nothing ever could. The world is a sort of prison or trap that all of it's denizens must suffer through....... the boredom and the struggle to perfect the heart. It is frightening to contemplate it's meaning but does succeed in making the reader aware that love and friendship are the only gifts that the world has to offer and that it is better to risk everything for the sole sake of love than to wish your life away hoping for some sort of personal validation or worldly treasure. The real treasure that the world has to offer lies not in anything material, but in the sacrifice of self for SOMEONE.........ANYONE ! so that the sum of the whole remains greater than it's individual constituents ````, —Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.32.84.21 (talk) 20:35, 9 April 2010 (UTC) Bill Bray (bray2074@bellsouth.net)

Editing notes
This reads more like a book report than an encyclopedia entry, and needs outside citation for the analysis. SarahTheEntwife (talk) 04:47, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

The link from CarsonMcCullers's page is actually referencing the collection of short stories by the same name, not the novella itself. Either this page should be expanded to encompass the entire collection or the link should be moved to the reference to the novella alone. SarahTheEntwife (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:41, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I tagged this as needing a complete rewrite. As far as I can tell, the novella was never published as a stand-alone volume, and the picture included in the current page certainly references the short story collection. It seems more appropriate to rewrite this to refer to the collection. "Ballad" was also adapted as a stage play (McCullers and Albee, 1965) and published separately, if anyone wants to add that to the disambiguation and make a separate page for the stage version. SarahTheEntwife (talk) 13:21, 7 December 2013 (UTC)


 * On a personal note, I regard Ballad very much as the fourth of CMcC's five major works, which I read shortly after her death - they were available as Penguins, and Ballad contained the novella and the six stories. That's why I have removed the titles of the novels here. But I welcome discussion, and agree that the article, reading like a school essay on the novella, needs work; just not sure exactly what. Rothorpe (talk) 14:42, 7 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh, neat, that's good to know. I'll see if I can find the citation for the Penguin edition so we can have the picture match the description.SarahTheEntwife (talk) 19:27, 7 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The Penguin edition would be great, but for the moment I've rewritten to match. Rothorpe (talk) 01:21, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks! That's so much more streamlined than what I had. SarahTheEntwife (talk) 02:00, 8 December 2013 (UTC)