Eudora Welty's Why I Live at the P.O.

1021 Words3 Pages

Favoritism The story I chose to analyze is “Why I Live at the P.O.” by Eudora Welty. The author, Eudora Wetly, is originally from Mississippi from a prosperous family, she was born in 1909 and passed away in 2001.During her early days she worked at small places involved with writing until she launched her literary career. ‘Why I Live at the P.O’ is about sibling rivalry and favoritism among family. My thesis states that this story shows a good example of favoritism among families and good insight from the outcast. My first impression of Eudora is that she is a well-off person with a good background and a very good education. Through this she has had the abilities to gain good literary knowledge she had attended university but returned home, she did not start her literary career until years later after several different careers in smaller jobs. However one issues I have found with her work is that she has a small town life designed as a universal reality. While popular media would say it’s all the same as well, anyone from a small town would tell you otherwise. It is always easy to tell that her work shows much of a general idea about small towns and their families, including how siblings think and families react to certain things. At first reading the short story which was a listed full of satire, it sounds like Welty is a jealous, spoiled older sibling who thinks much of herself and nothing of her sister. How she points out little things like the hat her sister is wearing starts showing how she focus on appearance could also symbolize the fact her sister is always getting nice things and not appreciating them, another example of her taking Mr. Whitaker from Wetly. Once you get further into the story, you find that many of he... ... middle of paper ... ... she did the right thing. Personal experience has shown me that it is better to be happy and alone and content with one choice, then to continue to live with extreme prejudice, ignorance and naivety. In the end, it does not matter how hard you try, or how perfect you think you are, or beautiful, or smart, or rich if you are not happy with yourself and your life nothing will change until you find the courage to initiate change. Works Cited Perlman, Helen Harris. "A Note On Sibling." American Journal Of Orthopsychiatry 37.1 (1967): 148-149. PsycARTICLES. Web. 17 Feb. 2014 Watanabe-Hammond, S. ( 1988). Blueprints from the past: A character work perspective on siblings and personality formation. In K. G.Lewis ( Ed.), Siblings in therapy: Life span and clinical issues New York: Norton. Wetly, Eudora. Why I Live at the P.O.. New Jersey : Pearson, 2014. 431-439. Print.

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