Symbolic References in Eudora Welty's A Worn Path

Symbolism is used in many ways and writers use symbolism to “enhance their writing.” It can give their work “more richness and color and can make the meaning of the work deeper.” In literary work the actions of the characters, words, action, place, or event has a deeper meaning in the context of the whole story. The reader needs to look see the little things like a dove symbolizes peace, or like the red rose stands for romance. Mostly everything can have a symbolism meaning to it. For instance the flag symbolizes freedom and the stars represent the states. Even some signs are symbols like when a beaker has a skull with a bones placed like an ‘x’ behind it symbolizes that it’s toxic or bad. When people see the red light when driving that’s a symbol to stop, the yellow to slow down, and the green to go.

In the short story, A Worn Path, an elderly colored women named Phoenix Jackson walks a path to get to a town called Natchez. Phoenix is old and small woman that wore a dark striped dress with untied shoelaces and she carried “a thin, small cane made from an umbrella,” [Welty 1274] with that she kept her balance. Phoenix went though many obstacles like getting tangled in a torn bush and crossing a creek by walking on a log that was over it. After that she sat down to get some rest and saw a little boy that gave her marble cake, but that ended when she reached up for it and the boy and cake were gone. Then she got up from where she sat and maneuvered through a barbed wire fence then passed through an old cotton field and went into a field of dead corn. While in the corn field Phoenix runs into a scarecrow which she thought was a man then a ghost. When she gets out of the maze of corn and keeps on walking and comes across a spring ...

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...lty put these many symbolic references for a purpose to get the reader into the story “A Worn Path.”

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