Ballad Of Sad Cafe

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“The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” by Carson McCullers is a novella that revolves around three significant characters in a love triangle. Lymon is one of the most out of ordinary characters in Carson McCullers theory of love. McCullers has very effectively portrayed the different characters and their characteristics in the novella. All over the novella Lymon has proved to show his character as a grotesque, and displays melodramatic and dependent behaviour and likes to be the center of attention. “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” is a story of a love triangle in which McCullers has illustrated physical changes and also their behavioural changes in all the three characters, specifically Cousin Lymon. Cousin Lymon was an abnormal looking grotesque character “the man was a hunchback. He was scarcely more than four feet tall” (6) He was not very attractive “His crooked little legs seemed too thin to carry the weight of his warped chest and the hump that sat on his shoulders” (7). Cousin Lymon was very smart since he accomplished to fool Miss Amelia that he was her cousin “hunchback scrambled among these belongings and brought out an old photograph” (8). Cousin Lymon proofs himself to be the cousin of Miss Amelia through this old photograph when it was even hard to distinguish the faces of the two ladies in the photograph. 

Cousin Lymon comes to find Miss Amelia because he is very selfish and poor at the same time. McCullers tells the readers when Cousin Lymon enters the town “the bag was full of all manner of junk – ragged clothes and odd rubbish” (8). Cousin Lymon did not own anything valuable. He was poor and he decided to fool Miss Amelia as she was the richest lady in town; so he can have a place to stay and use her for his needs such as food, money, clothes and perhaps also planned to make Miss Amelia fall in love with him so he can take advantage of her wealth. Miss
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