George Willard is a small town boy who is discouraged by the lack of direction in his life, and comes to mature by being the town medium in Winesburg, Ohio.

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        George Willard is a small town boy who is discouraged by the lack of direction in his life, and comes to mature by being the town medium in Winesburg, Ohio.  George Willard achieves maturity when he realizes and accepts loneliness as the essential human condition and understands the value of all human suffering.  There is a time in the life of every boy when for the first time he takes the backward view of life.  The thesis of this story is to show the maturation of George Willard from town boy to manhood.  

George was growing up and the thoughts of being a man filled his head.  He felt lonely as he contemplated his upcoming departure from Winesburg to a city where he hoped to work for a newspaper.  After his mother’s death, the feeling of maturity and loneliness had visited him often as it does with every boy at some point.  George Willard being the town medium has his fair share of “friends” that were woman.  One of the women George had longed for was Helen White.  George sees Helen as a beautiful girl with all the necessary attributes to find a good husband.  George cannot suppress his feelings for Helen.  It all started when Seth Richmond came to visit George one summer evening.  George and Seth began talking about different things and George stated how he wanted to write a love story.  George being a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle always tried to put himself in the position of or get into the head of his subject.  Writing a love story George would have to find someone to fall in love with.  This is where Helen White comes into the story.  “She is the only girl in town with any ‘get-up’ to her”(p129).  Since Seth knew Helen better than George did, he was going to be the one to tell her how George felt.  George did not know that Seth had feelings for Helen.  Seth becomes so agitated that when he meets up with Helen White he inadvertently reveals George’s message of love for her.  At this point, nothing happens between George and Helen.  Then comes an early evening day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair brought crowds of country people into town.  This was in the time of the George’s life where he was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts were coming into his mind.  Thoughts of how he was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city to work on a newspaper and he felt grown up.  George had tried in the past to make Helen White think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had taken place in his nature.  As George and Helen meet, he takes her to the top of the hill overlooking the fairground.  They kiss and hold hands but the impulse does not last.  Finally, as they return home, they throw away cloak of maturity and don their childhood cloak.  They play around pushing, laughing, and teasing.  At the end of the evening, they are both satisfied as if they have the thing they needed.  

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The story with George Willard and Belle Carpenter let us the reader to be able to contextualize George’s awakening when we witness his encounters with Belle and how he is driven from life.  Belle’s relationship with Ed Handby is unsure so she uses George to relieve her sexual repression.  George again serves as a medium for Ed because he gives Ed an obstacle to focus on.  Ed believes that Belle for some reason or another is the right girl for him.  Belle uses George to make Ed jealous.  Thus although George’s awakening came to no good end for him, he ...

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