32 pages • 1 hour read
William Carlos WilliamsPaterson
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3 Summary
Book 3 begins in a library—compared by the narrator to locust trees—where Paterson leafs through old newspaper files and observes the other patrons. The narrator sees both salvation and desolation in the library, which smells of stale heat. Several historical interludes describe local events: Native Americans accused of killing pigs and captured by Dutch soldiers, who killed the Native Americans; 19th-century thrill seekers who crossed the Falls on a tightrope and gave performances while aerial. The narrator meditates on the fraught relationships between men and women.
Paterson struggles with the urge to give up poetry altogether; he describes writing as like a fire across a landscape. The image of the fire connects Paterson’s thoughts to a historical interlude where Native Americans conduct a religious ceremony inside a wooden hut and to an accidental fire at a street railway company. The narrator explores the impact of fire on various objects. He also considers how fire is both beautiful and dangerous and how fire erases what’s in its path, including language.
A fire threatens to engulf the library and erase all of the language stored within it. An African American letter-writer, DJB, writes to a recipient she calls Kid. The narrator addresses a woman’s scarred legs and meditates upon the impermeability of language. A man named Henry complains to the narrator that it’s his fault his dog was caught by police and killed. An interlude describes a Native American funeral and burial procession. Another historical interlude tells the story of Sale Van Giesen, who shoots a spectral cat with a silver button loaded into a gun. One of his neighbors—who he suspects is a witch—has a wound on her leg the next day in the same place he shot the cat.
The river is beginning to flood to the point where it undermines the railroad embankment. An inserted table describes what types of rock were found at what depth at the Passaic Rolling Mill. The floodwaters of the river recede; what’s left behind is covered with silt. A historical interlude describes the process of preparing the body after death in African Ibibio culture. Near the end of this Book, the narrator connects the flow of language with the flow of the river over Passaic Falls.
Book 3 Analysis
Book 3 returns once again to the collaging techniques of Books 1 and 2, where many voices merge into a narrative polyvocality. Throughout this section, these voices blend and merge. In contrast to Book 2, Paterson the character does not form a steady thread throughout all of the collaged sections. Instead, Williams connects the events in this book through plot and through the setting of the library. The Book begins and ends close to the physical space of the library—it grounds the narrative meanderings throughout.
As an Imagist poet, Williams eschewed the conservatism of poetry of his time period in favor of freer, more loosely associated work. As the name implies, Imagism frequently used images—like the library—as major touchstones in their work. The lyricism of Book 3 is in keeping with Imagist principles; so is its focus on American history—especially in places of great contrast, such as when Williams compares the fire at the Native American religious space compared to the fire at the street railway company. He connects the fire imagery, too, to a meditation on poetry and the erasure of language: “We read: not the flames / but the ruin left / by the conflagration // Not the enormous burning / but the dead (the books / remaining...” (123). With fire, the library and all of its texts are literally erased: made into ash, decomposed into nothingness. This focus on the lack of language, and on erasure, presages Williams’s thoughts on poetry near the end of Book 5, especially its consideration of the future of poetry.
The flooding of the river creates a tonal counterpoint to the fire imagery of most of Book 3. Though both are representations of nature uncontained, the flooding is generative, leaving behind fertile silt that might be planted and then used for new growth, whereas the fire is destructive, taking away not only language but the capacity to use language—or removing staid historical language with the end goal of being able to write something new.
Related Titles
By William Carlos Williams
