Sherwood Anderson's, "I Want to Know Why" tells a story about how a boy's innocence was lost when the realization of life and mankind's grim realities were discovered. The boy told this story as a narrator with a first person point of view.
             As a boy, the narrator grew up in an environment that was "just horses and nothing else and the outfits starts out and horse racing is in every breath of air [they] breathe" (9), thus the perceptions of what's good in life and innocence are on the horses, specifically thoroughbreds, in which he also believed that "there isn't anything so lovely and clean and full of spunk and honest and everything as some race horses" (11). So much did the narrator loved and adored the horses that he thinks that "nothing smells better than coffee and manure and horses and niggers and bacon frying and pipes being smoked out of doors..." (12).
             During his adventurous trip to the famous Saratoga racetracks, the narrator encountered his favorite horse, Sunstreak, and his favorite trainer, Jerry Tillford. During the race, the narrator symbolic perceptions of good and innocence switched to Jerry because he "was thinking about Jerry Tillford the trainer and how happy he was all through the race. I liked him that afternoon even more than I ever liked my own father. [He] almost forgot the horses thinking that way about him. It was the first time I ever felt for a man like that" (13). However, his perception of Jerry is about to change as he followed him to a "little rummy-looking farmhouse [whorehouse] set in a yard" (14). There the narrator heard Jerry "bragged in that bad woman house as [he] knew Sunstreak wouldn't never have bragged. He lied and bragged like a fool. [He] never heard such silly talk." (14). Because he felt as though he was fooled or tricked, the narrator's perception of Jerry began ...