How Far She Went

By the fourth story, the notion of the symbolic replacing authentic, human experience deepens as the collection moves towards the title story’s climactic trauma, which disrupts all the pretense of the opening half of this collection. The fourth story paints an archetypical picture of pastoral Georgia that gives the impression one could leave the town and return to find everything exactly as one left it. It opens with the idyllic country setting: “a barefoot girl with a flat-top guitar [...] dogs, bellying low on the under-porch shadows” and apples you could “eat from the ground [...] without worrying about pesticide” (49). It ends with that same girl, “on the porch, guitar in hand, waiting for the evening train to run through” (66).

Sandwiched between these full-circle, picture-perfect moments—represented by the music box, which repeats its story with each opening and closing—is a family reunion of equally cyclical occurrence that is mildly disrupted by visitors intent on making this town their anecdote. This story signifies the acceptance of things as they should be in a typical country town—a resistance to change, and the notion that the picture-perfect portrait means a well-lived life. This life, however, is far-removed from reality, thereby keeping with the theme of isolation. This town and its traditions are symbolic of stasis, which is why so many tourists begin flooding the town in search of something idyllic. Hood suggests that people either need this nostalgia or are so lonely and lacking in nostalgia that they need to siphon it from others. The country girl becomes a conduit to an idealized mode of existence, one where things don’t change. And if things don’t change, people don’t need to worry about isolation, loss, or loneliness. The irony here is that, like the writer, the tourists will have to return to their everyday lives and whatever issues they left behind.