Neither Wing nor George Willard experiences any clear revelation or makes any climactic decision. Through a series of misunderstandings, a half-witted boy accuses Wing of making sexual advances on him, and Wing barely escapes the boys’ outraged fathers. Wing treated them gently, touching their shoulders or tousling their hair. Gradually the unnamed third-person narrator reveals Wing’s background: He had been a teacher in Pennsylvania, popular and well liked by the boys who attended his school. Wing had arrived in Winesburg two decades previously under unexplained circumstances. George is one of the few people in Winesburg who feel sympathetic to the peculiar Wing, and Wing will speak to no one but George. Part of Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), “Hands” also features George Willard, the reporter in the tales who, as a character in his own right, may be viewed as the progenitor of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams.
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