Symbolism In Eudora Welty's A Worn Path

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In Eudora Welty’s short story “A Worn Path”, we encounter a determined and courageous elderly woman, Phoenix Jackson. In this story, she is traveling a long path in order to obtain medicine for her sick grandson, though she travels this path frequently we see Phoenix come up against many obstacles and challenges. Despite Phoenix being surrounded by obstacles, she overcomes each of them and reaches her destination successfully. In “A Worn Path”, Eudora Welty uses symbolism to create a very vivid image of a courageous elderly woman, Phoenix Jackson who teaches the readers to never give up, no matter what we may encounter on our path of life. In “A Worn Path” we see Eudora Welty use quite a bit of symbolism, an example of her symbolism is the trees. There …show more content…

From the first page Welty creates an illusion of stepping into Phoenix’s world and walking through this path with her, this illusion is produced by intense descriptions. For example, as Phoenix passes by cabins, Welty could have simply said she was walking by the cabins and moved on. However, Welty choose to go in lengths about the cabins, “through the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there.” (Welty 420). Not only does Welty choose to brilliantly use descriptive words to enhance the imagery, she also chooses to spice up regular objects with descriptive words that you would not normally use in certain situations. Again, the example of the cabins; instead of the cabins being boring and old, they are glittering silver and described as woman sitting. Welty turned something that may have not had potential and gave it some. Although Phoenix’s journey is quite long and she endures plenty of conflicts, Welty transitions us quickly but yet

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