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A worn path by eudora welty literary analysis
A worn path by eudora welty literary analysis
A worn path by eudora welty literary analysis
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Authors who write about what they already know and their personal experiences typically are successful writers. Eudora Welty was born and raised in a small town located in Mississippi and all of her stories take place in small rural towns. Writing on what she knows, her works are filled with Southern vernacular and euphemisms. Through this unique approach, she is able to engage audiences, ranging from rural areas to urban ones. No matter where the reader is from, they can distinguish her unique writing from other authors due to her eloquence. Daring author, Eudora Welty, presents distinctive diction in her story “Why I Live at the P.O.”, through her excruciatingly Southern euphemisms and realistic word choices, which also possesses the presence …show more content…
They treat Stella-Rondo like a princess, believe everything she says, and the narrator is left to fend for herself. Along with Stella-Rondo’s return, she brings a bag of lies with her, including a lie about an “adopted” child. Of course, the ignorant family believe these lies, which causes the narrator to become extremely frustrated! The narrator is smarter than the rest of her family, and it’s not hard to be smarter, considering how simple minded they are. All-in-all, this is the common story of an endless sibling fight but with a twist, filled hilarious dialogue and copious amounts of Southern vernacular and …show more content…
This statement refers to diction as opposed to the plot, climax, or falling action. In “Why I Live at the P.O.”, Eudora Welty portrays the Southern life through her words. Simple two word phrases allow this story be amusing for its readers. For example, Eudora Welty writes “I’m poisoned” (PAGE). In translation that particular word choice actually means “I’m drunk”. A few more excruciatingly Southern phrases include, “he drank chemicals”, “I says”, and “drinking that prescription.” Believe it or not, this is how people talk in the South! Southern vernacular ranges from Southern Mississippi to Cajun. “Why I Live at the P.O.” takes place in the small rural town of China Grove, during a time when slavery still existed. Due to the fact that this story takes place in a Southern town, Welty use a realistic these word choices to coincide with the setting. She doesn’t exchange dialogue between two extremely Southern characters using the words Edgar Allen Poe would use. She uses realistic language that a Southern family during the twentieth century would use in their everyday conversation. For example, within the story Welty writes, “There I was over the hot stove, trying to stretch two chickens over five people” (1). This is realistic due to the setting. If she were to write “Here I am over the hot stove, trying to make sure that I have enough chicken for five people,” even
The story is told in first person through Tangy Mae Quinn, the darkest child of Rozelle Quinn. Rozelle is a light-skinned woman with ten children by ten different fathers, who separates her children based on skin color. She shows favoritism to her lighter skinned children and hatred to her darker skinned children. This is important because the story takes place in Parksfield, Georgia in the late 1950’s, right before the civil rights movement. It starts off with Rozelle Quinn teaching Tangy Mae how to clean her employer’s house because she believes she is going to die over the weekend. News of Rozelle “dying” spreads throughout the town and even beyond which brings her oldest child, Mushy, back into town. It is later revealed that Rozelle is only acting as if she is dying because she is pregnant. While in town, Mushy promises her siblings that she is going to save them from the abuse of Rozelle, but says Tarabelle has to be first due to Tarabelle’s exposure to prostitution. Months after giving birth to her child, Judy, Rozelle kills her by throwing her off the stairs. After this incident, the children slowly start to leave her although Tangy Mae and Laura stay by her side. After majority of her children have left, Rozelle is diagnosed with insanity and is forced to move in with Mushy. By the end of the story, Tarabelle is killed by a fire started purposely by her mother; Tangy Mae has graduated high school and taken Laura with her to cross the Georgia border.
Eudora Alice Welty practically spent her whole life living in Mississippi. Mississippi is the setting in a large portion of her short stories and books. Most of her stories take place in Mississippi because she focuses on the manners of people living in a small Mississippi town. Writing about the lives of Mississippi folk is one main reason Welty is a known author. Welty’s stories are based upon the way humans interact in social encounters. She focuses on women’s situations and consciousness. Another thing she mostly focuses on is isolation. In almost all of Welty’s earlier stories the main character is always being isolated. Throughout her short stories, a hidden message is always evident. Eudora Welty does a wonderful job of exposing social prejudices in the form of buried messages.
One of the biggest determinants for the success of a writer is engaging and maintaining the interest of a variety of readers. While there are endless approaches to telling a story, as well as many writing styles, the most effective writings are the ones that successfully impress a diverse audience. The essays Eating Chili Peppers and Conforming to Stand Out: A Look at American Beauty are two different styles of essays that unveil a similar search for self-gratification. While the essays cover different topics and the authors use different writing styles and approaches to engage the reader, they both unveil a similar underlying message of a search for self-gratification.
Eudora Welty is one of the leading American writers of the twentieth century. In her work “The Little Store,” Welty recollects from her memories of growing up. She humbly admitted that she lived a “sheltered life” growing up in the South as a woman. From this perspective, Eudora writes her short story as a means to tell her passage into adulthood.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
Since Sister was affected the most by certain actions of the family, Welty narrated this short story through Sister’s point of view to show how the function of the family declined through these actions. Sister was greatly affected when her sister broke the bonds of sisterhood by stealing her boyfriend and marrying him. Secondly, Sister was affected by the favoritism shown by her family towards her younger sister. Since her sister was favored more than her, this caused her to be jealous of her sister. For example, Sister shows a lot of jealousy by the tone she uses when describing what Stella-Rondo did with the bracelet that their grandfather gave her. Sister’s description was, “She’d always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away. Papa-Daddy gave her this gorgeous Add-a-Pearl necklace when sh...
When a writer starts his work, most often than not, they think of ways they can catch their reader’s attention, but more importantly, how to awake emotions within them. They want to stand out from the rest and to do so, they must swim against the social trend that marks a specific society. That will make them significant; the way they write, how they make a reader feel, the specific way they write, and the devotion they have for their work. Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgard Allan Poe influenced significantly the American literary canon with their styles, themes, and forms, making them three important writers in America.
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.
Gayl Jones suggests, “Not only does the dialect have more functions but it is used in a story of greater complexity of character, greater thematic range and literary sophistication. Though the people themselves are “simple” in the sense of being “ordinary folks,” their range is more than sentimental or comic emotion.” The dialogue in this story helps to move the narrative along and give it additional char...
O'Connor, Flannery. "Good Country People." Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002. 130-143.
Gilbert, Susan. ?Anne Tyler.? Southern Women?s Writers: The New Generations. Ed Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990: 272-73.
What role has reading had in your life? Through the essay, One Writer's Beginnings, Eudora Welty explores the memories of her childhood that are intertwined with her love of reading. Using effective diction, illustrative exemplification, and tone Welty lovingly reconstructs the scenes that helped develop her intense hunger for books that has followed her throughout her life.
Welty, Eudora. “Why I Live at the P.O.” Discovering a Voice: A Rhetoric for Writers. The University of West Alabama. Southlake, TX: Fountainhead, 2009. 359-67. Print.
Stella represents an important part in this drama by providing a contrast to how life can change people when they go down different paths. In contrast to her sister, Stella is bound to love. Although she fell in love with a primitive, common man, she most definitely loves him. Stella desires to make Stanley happy and live a beautiful life together. She wants to find peace between her sister and her husband, yet instead she finds conflict afflicting her on both sides.
Between the years of 1865 and 1914, American literature was mainly comprised of three writing styles: realism, regionalism, and naturalism. Realism aims to portray life realistically. Though realism...