Lonely and the Doctor.

The Winesburg connection- 

You see, the interesting thing about loneliness and alienation is that we as humans can truly understand the feeling that the characters feel inside the book. In "Paper pills" for instance, we can truly understand the hope that the beautiful wife gave him, he was able to open an entire world filled with his thoughts, his emotions, and his problems. I believe we can compare this to people in our lives who give us the strength and power to open up. The main character in Paper pills is known as Doctor Reefy, he is a doctor who helps people that are dying... in the mean time he writes his thoughts that are "little pyramids of truth" on scraps of paper, I feel like these little pieces of paper are our problems, the struggles that we have to tell with every day. These little scraps of paper represent the hardship and the pain and the suffering that each individual human has to deal with while taking care of those who are dying, ourselves. The beautiful woman, the magnificent, the wonderful woman represents the person that is willing to let you open all those scraps of paper, all the hardship and pain and suffering. And when Doctor Reefy lost that person, he became more desolate than anyone could have imagined.... because now he has to live with those scraps of paper, he has to live with the unbearable truth, the truth that he lives with everyday... the truth that we live with everyday. The fact that human nature is inherently awful, that we are selfish and loathing and jealous, that we are all dying the moment. Once we have lost that person we feel just as Reefy did... alone. His inability to communicate with anyone else is conveyed not only by the paper pills but also by Anderson's description of him sitting all day by a cobweb-covered window in his empty office. Anderson says, suggestively, "He never opened the window. Once on a hot day in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all about it." We will notice throughout Winesburg that many characters seem imprisoned in their rooms. 

I think that by our current society and its expectations... we will all be imprisoned in our rooms, we focus on jobs and money and impressing people... we praise people who do things that we consider rebellious and wrong, yet we forget to chase the most important thing, happiness. You see, the sad thing about Reefy is that he had love for a little, he got the chance to feel that open world, that sadness and pain being lifted off of him. Yet, he knows that he will never taste it again, because death is inevitable, and after losing someone like that,

so is loneliness.