The Strings of Analysis

O.K. Mantz

The short story “The Piano Tuner” is, in short, a story about life. A piano tuner, Claude, finds himself entangled in a lonely, old woman’s solitude and helps her navigate her depression by pushing her beyond her comfort zone. Throughout the narrative, the tone remains eerie and forlorn in mimesis of the story itself. Although each character interacts with each other, they remain perpetually alone and are portrayed with such distance from each other as to render each of the five main characters in complete and melancholic solitude. And five characters there indeed prove to be: Claude, Michelle, Evette, Sid, and the “seventeen-year-old boy” (p. 165).

There is also Michelle’s old house which, as less of a character and more of a symbol, is both the social sphere as well as the mentality in which each individual is trapped. The first of the five, Claude, is the piano tuner who mediates between Michelle’s depression (and in some ways his own) and the external help he encourages, such as the doctor’s visit and finding a job. Michelle, stuck in her grandfather’s home, is “depressed as hell” and becomes the image of the lonely individual, the pictorial representation of the melancholic disposition manifested (truly, steeped) in hindsight (p. 161). Michelle, at the end of her life, gazes back and marks her life a failure as she finds herself now without friends, without work (indeed, having never worked at all), the fear of death before her, and depression within. As the third character, Evette finds herself at home in the same (or at least strikingly similar) profession as Michelle Placervent’s in her younger years. Evette is extremely distant and adds almost nothing to the story, except that she does. She is the younger Michelle, inevitably bound upon the same path, and is the only other character, besides Michelle, who produces a deep sense of melancholia. Both a mother and a wife, as well as neither, Evette remains both spatially removed (as she never travels with him to see Michelle, but always remains within their house) as well as emotionally removed from Claude—throughout the narrative they never exchange a kiss, let alone a hug. From their son, Evette is even more removed, for the son is mentioned, but never present.

This mention, however, is precisely why he is the fourth character within the story. Never making an appearance, but twice noted in the text, the seventeen-year-old boy represents the reader: absent, yet always in need. The first time their son, Chad, is brought up, is when he is “starving” after practice, the second when he “[comes] down with the flu” and requires his mother’s graceful care (pp. 162 and 165). Likewise does the reader hide behind the page, beyond the reach of the literary world, but reading on precisely because there is a need to be fulfilled. And Sid, the final character within this carefully crafted narrative, fulfills this need. Both for Michelle and the reader, Sid provides work and entertainment, as well as reflection in its purest form. Only when Michelle takes the job as a pianist in the lounge does she verbally reflect upon her “wasted” life and her social status devoid of friends. Here, the reader too is confronted with their own life and their own “wasted” years in a culminating sensation of forlornness and depression.

When Michelle tears the Goerge Steck piano out of her house to make her grandfather’s structure crumble and burst in flames, the apotheosis marks the destruction of Michelle’s last tie to her depression and the reader’s final view of the sadness that is intermingled with each word.

This consummation of events, and ending that was both anticipated yet surprising, tore down the melancholic tone and constructed on this desolate foundation a tone of only mild despair, mixed with relief. For Michelle loses her miserable disposition and becomes more genuinely cheerful (no longer regulated by the extremely fake happiness produced by the pills); but along with losing her depression, she also loses her awareness, as witnessed on the very last page where she plays the piano and comments, in total ignorance of her surroundings, about “Scott Joplin” (pp. 174-175). Are depression and awareness inseparably intertwined? Tim Gautreaux would argue that they are.