Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories Themes

Love can make the world go round… but it can also start quite a fight. Regarded by some as a "bizarre love triangle," the story of Miss Amelia, Lymon Willis, and Marvin Macy is one where no one g...

What makes a good match? Depends whether you're talking about love or fighting. In The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the two often go together, and competition and confrontation are a natural outgrowth o...

Man alive! It's no surprise that a Southern female writer of McCullers's era would spend so much of The Ballad of the Sad Café's page real estate exploring manhood: whether or not characters live...

As soon as Miss Amelia strides onto the scene of The Ballad of the Sad Café, we can begin to understand that Miss Amelia is the perfect portrait of someone entirely unable, and wholly uninterested...

McCullers doesn't seem to be interested in what's fair and what's not. Her character's sense of justice has more to do with evening the score and going your own way. Meanwhile, rumors travel more q...

Isolation means nothing without the contrast of a community, for the characters in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Miss Amelia separates herself from the town after providing it a meeting place, while...

An internet search about the life of Carson McCullers reveals that she liked to drink. (One of her biographers wasn't very shy about it, calling her "sickly, paralyzed, alcoholic and depressed.") W...

This small Southern town has more scandals that Olivia Pope can shake a stick at. But because of the narrator's close-but-removed quality, it can sometimes feel like the reader is being manipulated...

Often the characters in The Ballad of the Sad Café can be mean or contrary or misanthropic or detached, but they melt in the presence of another human's pain. This imperfect stoicism, a closed-off...