A Short Story: "A Worn Path", By Eudora Welty

From the beginning of the story, the subscriber finds that the conspiracy of this tantrum and this old fair sex raises a question--why is she making this ride? Welty creates the setting in a few words with her first off sentence: "It was December--a b near frozen day in the early morning" (275). The old black woman is far let knocked out(p) in the country on a very refrigerated morning, and she is old and footling and has difficulty walking. Welty sets the scene, introduces the character and gives her name, describes her, and clearly describes how she is move through the woods in a determined way. The cast anchor is frozen, the old woman is supporting herself with a cane, and the resolve of the woman is clear, else why would she be making her way through this setting under these conditions with her frail and very aged legs?

While phoenix is the central character, and while her point of view is maintained on her travel, the reader is not invited into her thought processes except to the degree that she expresses them out loud. The old woman's determination is apparent as she cries out to the animals in the bushes to keep out of her way--she says she has a long way to go and does not want to be blocked:

Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would work shift at the brush

as if to rouse up any hiding things (276).

The author describes this journey in considerable detail, and the setting of the forest and environs is snappy to the effect. The old woman has been this road many generation, and she grapples every brushwood and every bush, and the road itself symbolizes her road through demeanor, a life that is as long as this journey. The author as well up describes nearly every blade of grass on the trip, relating each(prenominal) to the efforts of the old woman and so making the woman so far more heroic and more determined in the eye of the reader. The reader will have decided that this is an indomitable show even before she stands up to the hunter and his gun and shows that she fears nothing, not even death.

By the time this old woman reaches town, we neck a great deal about her.

We know she is courageous. We know that she is indomitable and will give every ounce of her efficacy to fulfill her mission. We know that she is a woman of integrity--she believes she has stolen the nickel, but this besides makes her integrity seem the stronger because of her moxie of guilt. This act also indicates to the reader that this is a woman who has fallen on hard times and to whom this nickel means a great deal, or else she would ne'er have stooped to "stealing" it with God watching everyplace her. She is devout as well. We know she has considerable pride and a sense of her own dignity when she asks a woman casual by to tie her shoestring for her: "Do all right for out in the country, but wouldn't look right to go in a big building" (285).

What she says to the woman who ties her shoelace is very real--she is a woman of the country, and she has a different sense of herself and her role outside than inside the big building. Once inside, she says nothing, retentiveness herself with dignity and refusing to answer the questions of the attendant who has not seen her before: " just now Phoenix only waited and stared straight ahead, her face very direful and withdrawn into rigidity"
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