Close Reading
Thomas Bangs Thorpe uses organization, structure, point of view, characterization, setting, and imagery in his story, A Piano in “Arkansaw”, to support his theme that arrogance and lying do not go unpunished. The story is organized as if it were being told orally. This contributes to the sense that the events in the story made a large enough impact on the narrator and the other people in the town that they still talk about it. When it was discovered that Mo was not as worldly and knowledgeable as he claimed to be, it caused a major upset rather than something that blew over in a couple of days. The story begins and ends with the piano. The discussion about Mo’s “superiority”, his trips to the Capital, and his “pre-eminence over all competitors” are mentioned in the middle of the story. This minimizes his relatively positive qualities, in a way that foreshadows how they are minimized to nothing by the end of the story. The story is about Mo, but he’s not even mentioned until after a detailed description of the piano and the theories circulating in the town. It’s as if A Piano in “Arkansaw” seeks to warn the reader: If you behave as if you’re better than everyone else as Mo did, you will be humiliated and then forgotten. You won’t even be the most important element in a story about you. The use of dialogue makes the story seem realistic. Thorpe successfully captures the Arkansas dialect and makes it distinct from the way Patience speaks. This is probably the result of the author’s experiences living in both the North and the South. The story is told in first person, by an unnamed citizen of Hardscrabble who witnesses everything that happens for him or herself. The narrator remains reasonably objective, and reveals almost none of his or her own biographical information. This narrator also implies that he or she witnessed Mo and Jim’s first visit to the Doolittle’s apartment and attended the party. The narrator goes along with the collective group opinion, and if he or she knew what a piano was before the very end, there was no indication. If we knew the gender, age, or race of the narrator, this information would not make much of an impact on the story. This is because the story is something that would be passed down through generations, and retold by various people. The narrator is amusingly ignorant, enunciating “rhi-no-ce-rus” and “so-i-ree”, which shows that Thorpe has a sense of humor about his characters, and makes it believable that nobody in the town knew what a piano or a washing machine was. Other examples of humor are the old ladies who thought the piano broke its leg on the trip down to Arkansas and Jim asking if houses with pianos were always so closed up. These examples show that even though the people in the town are isolated and unaware of other cultures, they are at least sympathetic and curious. For this reason, the narrator never passes judgment on the town’s people the way that he or she harshly judges Mo and mildly criticizes Jim. Moses Mercer is the main character of the story. In the beginning Mo is extremely well thought of by the people in the town. When rumors of the piano begin to circulate, it is assumed that Mo will be able to explain to everyone what a piano is. Mo is also the son of a state senator, which indicates that families stayed in Hardscrabble for generations, and that children inherited their parents’ reputations, whether the children deserved to or not. Mo was known as “the oracle of the renowned village of Hardscrabble” simply because of his father, and the fact that claimed to have gone to the “Capitol” twice. Jim Cash is another important character. “Mo Mercer’s right hand man” was not immune to the same character flaws as Mo, but he was the victim of blindly believing everything Mo said. He also had the same fascination with a piano as the rest of the town’s people, and in that sense Jim can be seen as all of the citizens of Hardscrabble compounded into one person. When Mo and Jim went to the Doolittle’s apartment for the first time, Jim was “all fears”, which may allude to an underlying fear of the unknown in the town. However, the narrator does say, “these fears Cash frankly expressed”. This shows that while Jim did not come off as being as cultured or tough as Mo, he was honest and never tried to be someone he wasn’t, and these are the qualities that ultimately turn out to be more admirable. The third developed character is Patience Doolittle, although she is less developed than Mo or Jim. Patience is from the North, and is the only exposure most people in the town have to someone “foreign”, so it is noteworthy that the narrator describes her as smiling and admiring of people with musical taste, because those are probably now the preconceived notions that the town’s people will have about people from the North. The narrator also says that Patience throws the cover off of the piano “carelessly and gracefully”, suggesting the conflicting feelings other characters may have about Patience. There is a sense of bitterness toward the “Union”, but in the end everyone at the party seems to be fascinated and charmed by Patience. The story is set is Hardscrabble, Arkansas. Hardscrabble is a typical small town, in that rumors spread quickly and people’s roles are well defined. Mo is unanimously considered the authority on all things relating to high society and admired by all the girls in the town. The two old ladies who went to investigate the Doolittle’s apartment went “presuming upon their age and respectability.” The story is also set in an era around or during the civil war, because word like “Union” and “Capital” are in parentheses, and the Doolittle’s are said to have “emigrated” from New England. There are not any direct references to war or fighting. Nevertheless, this indicates that the United States in the story was not unified the way it is now, if not officially divided then divided in the eyes of the people living in the South. This explains the cultural differences between the Doolittle’s and the rest of Hardscrabble, which led to the misunderstandings about the piano. Arkansas didn’t become a state until 1836, and from 1861 until 1856 it was part of the Confederate States of America. We don’t know the exact year that A Piano in “Arkansas” takes place, but for most of Thorpe’s adult life, Arkansas was not part of the United States. However, at the end, the piano becomes more and more popular in Hardscrabble. The piano was something distinctly Northern, so its integration into Southern society could be seen a gradual acceptance of the Northern states and their culture. The choice of the piano is also significant. A piano is something that’s not really necessary for a family to have. It takes up space and is expensive to buy and maintain, making it a symbol of wealth. Since nobody in Hardscrabble even has any idea what a piano is, this shows that it’s unlikely that anyone in the town is wealthy. However, it’s curious that the Doolittle’s still have a piano, even though they left the North because they were poor. This shows that the North and South were like (if not actually) separate countries, because a Northern family who was so poor that they had to move could still be one of the wealthiest families in a Southern town. The washing machine that Mo and Jim thought was a piano is also a symbol of wealth, so ironically in that sense, Mo’s claim that the washing machine was a piano was not too far off. Since neither Mo nor Jim recognized the washing machine either, it’s likely that the people of Hardscrabble had to wash their clothes in a river, which wouldn’t leave much time to absorb culture. Besides the piano and the washing machine, most of the imagery in A Piano in “Arkansaw” relates to nature, which is a subtle way of describing the scenery. For example, Mo brags that he’s seen more pianos than woodchucks. We know that Hardscrabble is probably not an industrialized city, and there are plenty of wild animals, because people are only more interested when they find out that a piano is a musical instrument instead of an animal. Mercer turns the crank on the mysterious machine “as coolly as a northern wind to an icicle.” All of these elements contribute to the theme, which makes Thorpe successful at teaching a lesson while entertaining his audience and painting an authentic picture of small town Arkansas.