"Elbow Room" Summary

An editor feels obliged to impose order on a piece by a shrill author who is an open enemy of conventional narrative categories, holds unevenness a virtue, and flaunts traditional modes. The editor points out flaws in discipline in comments on the draft of a story that begins with Paul Frost leaving Kansas for school in Chicago and remaining there to work in a mental hospital as an alternative to being drafted. Paul attends Quaker meetings, reads history, philosophy, and moral philosophy, and realizes many inmates are sane. Emerging rarely from his room, and not dating, Paul is taken for an idiot. After months of silence, Paul asks a patient why he is here and is unsettled when the patient turns the question back at him. Paul begins talking with total strangers, and everyone seems to be in a...