acters to our own time and society.
In Winesburg, Ohio, George Willard is presented as a man who is struggling with the dilemma of being true to his inner dream, or sacrificing it for economic enrichment. Through a series of tales we see the inhabitants of Winesburg and the development of George Willard. George’s character development has three aspects and each of them illuminate something about him and the townspeople as well as revealing the ability of humans, as different as they may be, to somehow connect. In fact, touch is extremely important throughout the tales in order to show Anderson’s belief that humans can somehow connect to each other. However, it seems he feels they must undergo the same type of transformation or character development as Willard does in order to be in a position to do so on a deep and meaningful level, “George’s inward life clearly reflects the conflict Anderson himself had experienced between the world of practical affairs, with its emphasis on the activity of money-making and its definition of success in financial terms, and the world of dreams, with its emphasis on imaginative creativity and its definition of success in terms of the degree of penetration into the buried lives of others” (Anderson 150-151).
The resolution to this dilemma is solved to a large degree from Willard’s efforts to under
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