The Ballad of the Sad Café, is a very descriptive passage that portrays a small town in which used to be a café. Carson McCullers, the author of this passage, uses a great deal of imagery to paint the proper picture of the setting and the character. Though the passage is brief, it gives the reader a detail explanation of what is going on in the plot. It starts in the present but then it flashes back to when Miss Amelia ran the café and the town was a happier place. Now Miss Amelia can be seen in the old boarded café, looking down at the town. Her appearance is described as ghostly and of someone that has been forgotten. Throughout the passage, McCullers uses setting, characters, and imagery to illustrate the story of The Ballad of the Sad Café.
In the beginning of the passage, the reader is introduced to the setting of the story, a small town.
English: The Iguana Cafe in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
1874 Triple Hanging at H.M. Prison Gloucester
1st edition (publ. Houghton Mifflin)"The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long." As McCullers opens this passage, you can almost picture a dead town. As the author describes it, it is not a very happening place. He explains that there are only two room houses, where the workers in the area live. This may be depicting that many people do not live here anymore. A guess would be that maybe after the café was shut down, many people moved out of the area because of the lack of a functioning society. McCullers goes on to explain the town: "If you walk along the main street...