Guide Mentor

Character Role Analysis

The Town

In Ballad, the town behaves as judge and jury, a parent at arm's length, or gossip columnists. When Marvin Macy's parents abandon him and his siblings is just a boy, the town steps up, the narrator noting, "this is not a town to let white orphans perish in the road before your eyes" (Ballad.85).

They watch as his marriage falls apart, and murmur as Miss Amelia takes a strange hunchback into her lodgings. For the most part, the story treats the town and townspeople as a single organism, who comment on the action freely but only step in when things go truly bad. Like the Muppets' Statler and Waldorf they're up in the cheap seats, but that doesn't mean that they don't care about what's going on.

Mister Bilderbach

McCullers finds a more traditional mentor in piano teacher in Mister Bilderbach, but he's not warm and fuzzy either. He calls his pupil Frances "Bienchen," only when she makes a big mistake at the keys. Both teacher and pupil find themselves disappointed that she's not meeting the potential he thought she once had, and even his pet names have a bite.