"The Paperhanger"- An Uncanny Similarity

We recently read a story in Creative Writing entitled "The Paperhanger" by William Gay. The story is a fictional account about the disappearance of a four year old girl. The story begins with a paperhanger (a paperhanger is a person who decorates with wallpaper) working at the house of a wealthy doctor and his wife. The wife scolds the paperhanger for doing a poor job on the walls. The wife proceeds to leave the house, but not before calling her four year old daughter, Zeineb, to join her. Her shout elicits no response, and the wife quickly realizes that her daughter is no where to be found. She notifies the authorities and an investigation and search party immediately ensue. Much like any mystery/crime story, there are a number of initial suspects: the paperhanger himself, the father of the girl, etc. Gay crafts the story in such a manner that points to the paper hanger from the very beginning, being so blunt as to even have another character refer to the paperhanger as "creepy." Accordingly, the main question becomes how the girl was taken, rather than who, in fact, took the girl. At the end, Gay verifies readers' suspicions when he reveals the culprit in an episode where the paperhanger is standing over the girl's mother, reminiscing over his crime; the paperhanger nostalgically recalls snatching the girl from the house, stuffing her in his toolbox, leaving the scene, murdering the innocent toddler, and then burying her corpse in a graveyard.

Any crime so heinous entails psychological complexities on the part of the perpetrator. It wasn't difficult to draw some clear connections between the paperhanger's twisted self and many of the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Over the entirety of the story, Gay presents the paperhanger as a completely isolated character-- cut off from society and out of touch with his emotions. This aspect of the paperhanger reminded me of several of the characters in the book-- Jose Arcadio Buendia and Colonel Aureliano Buendia, most notably. For much of their lives, both of these characters confine themselves to the Buendia family office, cutting themselves off from the rest of the world and entirely absorbing themselves in their work. Though neither of these characters ever go to measures as extreme as the paperhanger, they both have rather tragic endings. Jose Arcadio Buendia, inspired by Melquiades, devotes much of his life to discovery. He becomes so obsessed over science and exploration that he eventually spirals into insanity and lives out his elderly years tied to the family's chestnut tree. The Colonel leads most of his life as a man unable to feel emotions; the war and deaths of several of his close friends and family members worsen his admitted inability to feel. Upon returning home to Macondo after fighting, the Colonel, instead of socializing and attempting to recover from the scars left by the War, encloses himself in his office. He burns all of his previous poetry and collapses into a pattern of crafting his famous metal fish, burning the batch, rebuilding them, and repeating this vicious cycle over and over again. The Colonel goes as far as to commit suicide.

"The Paper Hanger," a 21st century short story by a relatively unknown American author, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, perhaps the most famous 20th century South American work by the world renowned Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are about as different in origin as two stories can be. Despite these apparent differences, both stories are testaments to the dangers of isolation and both offer a keen insight into how susceptible people are to a collapse into insanity.