Placelessness in Stuart Dybek's short stories : the new tramps

The article explores the sense of placelessness in two collections of short fiction by Stuart Dybek: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990). It examines the role of vagrants in "The Palatsky Man", "Chopin in Winter", "The Wake", "Sauerkraut Soup" and "Nighthawks", in comparison with the places occupied by other characters. By using Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality as a discourse on space, the article explore the function of place in these stories in terms of the degree of exclusion of marginal populations and explore the dichotomies of place/placelessness and inclusion/exclusion. The places he describes in his stories create a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, one that he represents by placing vagrants and immigrants in specific narrative scenarios. There are indications that immigrants want to enter the area of inclusion, whereas this drive is less clear cut in the case of vagrants.