It was dark and vague outside. The storm had rolled away to faintness like a wagon crossing a bridge.
What a great opening line, right? Except that in the hands of a talent like Eudora Welty, this is not the opening line of the story, but the closing. Welty’s extravagant talent for metaphor is put on full display in this line that brings her story to a close both with a stark sense of finality to the symbolism of the storm with which it opens and with an ambiguous sense of potential for what may follow next in the lives of its characters.
“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
Journeys—both literal and metaphorical and, usually, a commingling of the two—play a huge role in the short stories of Welty. The author herself directly addressed the significance of this highly quotable line from this story when she observes of being in love that it is mysterious with the potential for anything to happen. Doc’s wisdom applies quite well to many of Welty’s stories; they are filled with excursions of one sort or another down paths fraught with mystery and the possibility for both wonderful and horrible things to occur.
But here I am, and here I’ll stay. I want the world to know I’m happy.
The uniquely idiosyncratic narrator of one of Welty’s most well-known stories plainly and forthrightly asserts her emotional state since she moved out of her family’s house and started living at the small town’s Post Office. It is a testament to Welty’s precise control of the irony of her narratives that of all the many things which Sister does plainly and forthrightly assert, a specific explanation of why she lives there is never one of them. It is only through inference and implication that readers can answer for themselves the still lingering question of why Sister lives at the P.O.
On the road he did some things rather out of a dream. And the recurring sight of hitch-hikers waiting against the sky gave him the flash of a sensation he had known as a child: standing still, with nothing to touch him, feeling tall and having the world come all at once into its round shape under- foot and rush and turn through space and make his stand very precarious and lonely.
This paragraph is vintage Welty. Firstly, the description is about the one major character of the story who is not one of the titular itinerant travelers of the road. Secondly, the attentive reader will be alert to the scent of character description in this third paragraph of the story that seems highly likely be revealed as quite significant later, but which is endowed with mystery out of context. Those two elements of the art of fiction can be again and again in her stories as she continually reveals her daunting talent for breaking the conventional rules of storytelling and using them to make her storytelling all the more worth reading.
She listened for the blows, and dreaded that whole army of wings—of flies, birds, serpents, their glowing enemy faces and bright kings’ dresses, that banner of colors forked out, all this world that was flying, striking, stricken, falling, gilded or blackened, mortally splitting and falling apart, proud turbans unwinding, turning like the spotted dying leaves of fall, spiraling down to bottomless ash; she dreaded the fury of all the butterflies and dragonflies in the world riding, blades unconcealed and at point—descending, and rising again from the waters below, down under, one whale made of his own grave, opening his mouth to swallow Jonah one more time.
“The Burning” came later in Welty’s career and reveals a writer full engaged with the power of literature at the top of her game, transforming prose into a kind of poetry. The story is atypical for Welty: a brutally realistic portrait of the past. Typically, Welty places her characters in a time consistent with her the period in which she wrote it and on those occasions when she travels in the past, the purpose is for greater symbolic distance. The symbolism, metaphors, similes and imagery flies as freely here—perhaps more so—then usual, but for the aggregated intent of deepening the sense of immediacy and reality. A reality that is, perhaps, a level or two beneath the conventional mode of realism. “The Burning” digs so deep that it verges on becoming—as exemplified here—one of the most ferocious of the very few examples of genuinely Expressionist literature by a famous American short story author. A domain inhabited almost solely by William Faulkner among Welty’s peers and one of the very select few which rivals Faulkner’s mastery of the technique.
