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This story, like “The Magic Barrel”, is characteristic of the skillful combination of the comical and the pathetic found in a great number of contemporary American short stories. The scenes of conflict between Kessler and the janitor, Gruber’s huge bulk climbing painfully his own sagging stairs, Kessler being expelled bodily from his apartment and sitting obstinately on a split chair under the sleet, the hysterical shrieks of the Italian woman and the boys dropping everything to carry the old man back to his apartment, above all the last scene showing Kessler and Gruber on the floor, wrapped in white sheets, and swaying back and forth in self-mourning, are all scenes creating a highly entertaining comical effect. Yet this important element of farce that eliminates from the story the danger of melodrama and sentimentality is inextricably mixed with the deeply pathetic human situation.
The story is naturalistic-the filth, the stink, the dilapidated tenement, the repulsive people who inhabit it, all contribute to create a setting common among naturalistic stories stressing the ugliness and the misery of the slums of a modern metropolis. Yet, in such a setting the human soul can blossom beautifully, like a flower growing on a garbage heap. “The Mourners” is the story of the flowering of two such souls.
Both Kessler and Gruber pass from a state of callous unawareness of their true souls to a state of complete awareness and full consciousness. Kessler, the misanthropist, had walked out on his wife and children simply because he could not stand them and he had never sought nor even seen them afterwards. Thirty years had passed since and he had no idea where they were “nor did he think much about it.” As for his co-tenants Kessler “had contempt for them all.” At the end of the story a reversal takes places. Sitting in the sleet on the sidewalk after his expulsion, he “thought through his miserable life”, and remembered how, as a young man, he had abandoned his family without even in some way attempting to provide for them, without once trying to discover if they were alive or dead. Then comes his moment of recognition of his sin against humanity: “how in so short a life could a man do so much wrong?” Mad with remorse he “tore at his flesh with his fingernails.”
Gruber undergoes a similar transformation. His starting point is different from Kessler’s, but he comes to the same experience of a moment of recognition and reversal. While Kessler had withdrawn from work and society, free from worries, satisfied, with few wants, Gruber was a very active businessman, full of financial worries and suffering from ulcers and indigestion, but, like Kessler, showing little care for his fellow human beings, his tenants, and their misery. While driving to the tenement to expel Kessler a second time, all the while “he was thinking of his worries: high repairs costs; it was hard to keep the place together; maybe the building would some day collapse.” At one point his exasperation reaches a climax: “I’ll throw them all out, the bastards” he tells himself.
At the height of misery he is, like Kessler on the sidewalk, ripe for the moment of recognition and reversal. In the last scene of the story, watching Kessler mourning obstinately on the floor, Gruber realizes that something is wrong and he “tried to imagine what and found it all oppressive.” He wished he could run away from Kessler’s sight because he feels he is on the verge of a bitter revelation about himself. Unable to move, he feels all the pain of the recognition taking shape slowly: “an enormous constricted weight in him slowly forced itself up” to full consciousness and Gruber “suffered unbearable remorse for the way he had treated the old man.” He is overcome by the compulsion to throw himself on the floor next to Kessler and mourn with him for the inhumanity of man to man.
This moment of recognition and the consequent reversal into human brotherhood are the result of the spontaneous humanity of the old Italian woman shrieking hysterically at the sight of Kessler in the snow until her carrying-on awakes the humanity dormant at the bottom of the hearts of the men around her.
“The Mourners” is a satire on modern city life which contains an affirmation of faith in the basic goodness of man
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