though it has a somewhat slow, unwavering start, i suppose that’s how it was meant to be taken. stoners’ loneliness is palpable since the very start, and williams’ writing enhances it in such ways that i felt hope when stoner did and the closest thing to despair when the situation called for it too.
in the introduction, stoner is described as a love story, and though it took some time for that idea to develop, i fully stand by it now. stoners’ feelings, his motivations (or lack of) rounded out a character that cannot be fully described.
“what did you expect?” stoner asked himself, and to the audience, as he recounts his life and his mistakes, as he slips in and out of consciousness and takes his final breath. there’s a certain cruelty, or rather a feeling of being laughed at, by that question, because truly: what did i expect?
the loneliness that followed throughout the book seeps into the bones, and it possesses you as well as it did stoner, but even amidst it there is a refuge, there are books, there is katherine, there is teaching and loosing oneself into knowledge, and just there the subversion of a routine happens and leaves us to question what exactly did we expect.