The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

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Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" depicts the story of a dying woman's life. Throughout her eighty years of life Mrs. Weatherall has had her fair share of disappointments, heartaches, and unfavorable outcomes. This short story is written in a manner that allows the reader to get an outside view looking in; similar to looking at the story through a window as if being acted out in front of you in the theater. The story is eloquently written and leaves the reader with a sense of familiarity towards the family. The populations of readers who have had the pleasure of experiencing this pathetic story have come to relate their own experiences and disappointments towards the story and have empathetic feelings towards the main character Granny Weatherall. This story has many themes, but when I read it the underlying feeling of understanding and familiarity I related to was heartaches and pain that no amount of time can heal, or make vanish, that they are indeed part of the human condition. Porter, the author of this masterpiece, has chosen the name Weatherall for the main characters' name, throughout this essay, and during of the story we see how the name comes to be of importance. Granny has had a very difficult life and for her last name to be Weatherall, (weather-all means to endure whatever it takes to still be standing strong) is a play on words I think the author put in just to awake the reader. At the beginning of the story we are introduced to an elderly Granny Weatherall who has become bed stricken, stripped of her independence, childlike, and most of all bitter and condescending, to all. As the reader gets further involved into the short story, Porter divulges more clues as how Granny has become the person t... ... middle of paper ... ... for a long time." (517). Twenty years later, she feels shorted, now it has become her time and she knows it, "so my Lord, this is my death and I wasn't even thinking about it. My children have come to see me die" (522), and now she is not ready or prepared for it. She has not yet given her things away to her beloved children. Waiting for her Angel to come whisk her away to the afterlife, she asks God "give a sign" (522), with no response she looks around the room and, "again no bridegroom and the priest in the house, she could not remember any other sorrow, because this grief wiped them all away" (522). Granny feels, "oh, no, there's nothing more cruel than this--I'll never forgive it" (522). Granny passes into the afterlife as peacefully as she can, and she knew that everything she had in life did not come easily, and she earned everything she had accomplished.

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