"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty
To narrate her short story, Eudora Welty chooses to utilize the third person omniscient point of view. This allows for her audience to analyze the actions of her protagonist, Phoenix Jackson, objectively as well as through the perspectives of several other minor characters in an attempt to better understand Jackson's character. First, Welty includes passages of Jackson speaking to herself and experiencing hallucinations to emphasize Jackson's feeble mental integrity. For example, after she crossed a creek, Jackson rested and "a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it . . . but when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air," (Welty 224). Secondly, Welty includes dialogue between Jackson and a white hunter to characterize her bold, fearless, determined nature. After the hunter aims his weapon at Jackson and asks if she is scared, she replies, "No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by," (Welty 227). Through the hunter, Welty also reveals why Jackson has been travelling through the woods: she needs to reach the local town. Once Jackson arrives in town, she visits a nurse's office to acquire medicine for her grandson. However, from what the nurse says to Jackson, one may reasonably infer that the boy has already died. She talks of how routinely Jackson makes this trek, how sad it is that the boy's throat will not heal, and reaffirms the cause of his plight: swallowing lye. In sufficient quantities, ingesting lye becomes deadly; the boy has died, but Jackson refuses to let go. Instead, she leaves the nurse's office, painted as a bold, loving, headstrong, yet grief-stricken old woman, to purchase a Christmas gift for the boy, or rather the boy's memory, that she loves so dearly.
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