Monthly- Archives: February 2012

February 29, 2012


BEN H

I was watching the comedy show on a cruise with my friends when the comedian asked for a volunteer. I watched to see if anyone would raise his or her hands. There were many but I was not one of them. Then the comedian went into the audience and picked out a person – that person was me. We were in the front row and all my friends were pointing at me to get comedian/magician’s attention. Part of me wanted to stay because I was afraid I was going to mess up, but the other part wanted to go onto the stage and have fun. Before I could decide, I was already onstage with the comedian and I saw thousands of people watching me. What I thought in my mind was “uh-oh.”

Onstage I saw nothing but the stage lights. It blinded my vision of the audience. The lights seemed to be burning my eyes, and along the sides I saw the curtains. I’ve always wanted to know what goes on backstage. They were red and looked to be velvety and it was like a cup cake in curtain form. I saw the curtains swaying back and forth, like a tiny little toddler on a swing being pushed by his father. Then behind red curtains I could see pitch-black chairs. The straight-line patterns on the chairs made them look like round conveyor belts. Next to the chairs were lights. Each one had a stand to hold them up. The lights were all different colors. There was bright blue, ruby red, perky pink, and a lot more.

My heart was pounding out of my chest and beating at 186,000 miles per second. Sometimes I think you can die of stage fright and this was one of those frightening moments: being on a stage in front of thousands of guests on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean wanting good, amusing, impressive entertainment. At that moment I felt as if I was in a room full of broken glass and nails, and that is the feeling of despair and misery. Suddenly I saw the entertainer babbling to the crowd and then he told me to do something. I didn’t know what to do yet and my heart was pounding “boom clash thump boom clash thump” every millisecond. Then the entertainer told me to hold on to a plastic egg that he called an African ostrich egg, which was a name used to impress the audience.     

“Now I want you to hold this egg,” shouted the magician. I held the tiny, miniscule egg. He now hollered, “hand it to me.” Then he took the egg and hid it under his armpit. He did this in a way that made it amusing, and made it obvious for the audience to see. The audience burst into laughter. Then the magician purposely dropped the egg and now the audience was going wild. Then he told me to put the egg in a purple leather bag. He twirled it around and told me to say the magic word “presto” and he opened the bag and he told me to reach in. It was empty. I gazed inside the bag. There was no egg. I was amazed. Then the entertainer and the audience gave me a round of applause.

I started to walk off the shiny, black stage when the magician called me back and gave me a magic kit. It said, “Learn 15 magic tricks in 15 minutes!” So I took the kit and walked off the stage. Once I was on the very edge of the stage the magician called me over yet again. This time everyone was laughing. The magician gave me a CD, too. This one said “Your Friends Will be Amazed!” There was also a picture of the magician on the cover. He was doing the floating card trick.  It looked astounding. The card actually looked like it was floating in mid-air. After I received the CD I walked back to my seat. This time he didn’t call me back onstage. He did another fantastic trick. Now that I was sitting in my seat again I realized that when I was onstage it wasn’t frightening, but it was a very memorable moment.

February 13, 2012


ROBERT C

Roosevelt, Vidal; Reagan, Buckley

 

  

 

The two modern political traditions of our country are liberalism and conservatism, and they can be characterized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, respectively. These two men established standards of excellence that politicians now aspire to. Gore Vidal and William Buckley Jr. are two of the most significant political commentators of the last century, and for the most part, they judge politicians on how they stack up compared to the traditions as represented by the two. For Vidal, not a single president has even come close to Roosevelt’s production and leadership, and for Buckley, Reagan remains the epitome and exemplar of conservatism.

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, otherwise known as FDR, presided over one of the most turbulent phases of American history. Roosevelt was born into the two most distinguished families of New York at the time, the Roosevelts and the Delanos. Ulysses S. Grant and Calvin Coolidge were notable members of the latter family, and Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent representative of the former. Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression and World War II, two ordeals that an overwhelming percentage of historians agree were among the three greatest challenges that America has ever faced (along with the Civil War).

 

Roosevelt entered the international political scene at one of its most chaotic times. Europe had been devastated by World War I. In the Weimer Republic, for example, inflation destroyed the reputation of the government; Germans lost faith in their leaders when hyperinflation hit and their life savings became nearly worthless. As John Maynard Keynes, an economist during the time period stated, “The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance.”  The countries of Europe lost millions of acres of farmland during World War I, and entire manufacturing districts in England and Germany were decimated.

 

Following World War I, the United States emerged as a world superpower and Americans started to grow more confident. Innovations during the 1920s persuaded Americans to spend extravagantly, and the practice of spending on credit became widespread. When people realized they couldn’t pay back their debts and that companies had based their stock quotes on this fictional payment from their customers, the economy collapsed. Luckily for citizens, a strong crusader for the people emerged from the Democrats in FDR. Roosevelt saw the need for dramatic reforms in order to regain favor and trust his country. He instated the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps in order to create new jobs for Americans, and established the National Recovery Administration and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in order to increase regulation on large business. For the long term, Roosevelt saw the need to create a safety net for the American people, to ensure that families were never again devastated as they were during the Great Depression. FDR signed the Glass-Steagall Act, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), giving Americans the assurance that they would not lose their money (insuring up to $5,000, worth approximately $60,000 in 1940) if the banks collapsed again. He also signed and partially drafted the Social Security Act, which gave all citizens the benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. This was the first time that our government had created such a permeating federal assistance program. Roosevelt’s overall body of work, legislatively, led to the creation of modern liberalism, which supports an equitable welfare state (Social Security Act and FDIC), and government involvement in economy (NRA and CIO).

 

Reagan is the Roosevelt of the Republicans. He reinvigorated and reinvented the Republican Party, something that had not been done since another Roosevelt was in office. Reagan is most celebrated by conservatives as the champion of supply-side economics. Centuries earlier, Adam Smith had envisioned an “invisible hand” that pushed market outcomes to naturally be the most efficient. He hypothesized that taxes were bad for any economy because they pushed this invisible hand away from the “equilibrium,” or natural balance, of the market. Andrew Mellon, as the Secretary of the Treasury under Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover, themselves US presidents, all studied and were influenced by Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations”, widely considered to be the magnum opus of economics. Mellon saw the advantages of reducing taxes, and up until the Great Depression, facilitated the reduction of the national debt, ultimately achieving a 47.6% decrease. Arthur Laffer, a renowned economist and member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, then labored over a way to prove the effectiveness of cutting taxes.

 

What he produced is now known as the Laffer curve, and is a staple of modern economics; it is a visual representation of the rate of government revenue with different taxes. A simplified view of his theory is that tax revenues would be zero if tax rates were either 0% or 100%, and somewhere in between 0% and 100% is a tax rate that maximizes total revenue. Laffer’s belief was that the tax rate that maximizes revenue was at a much lower level than previously believed: so low that current tax rates (2012) were above the level where revenue is maximized. Reagan became the first president to support the cutting of taxes on the basis that American taxes were not centered (which represents maximum revenue) on the Laffer curve. While government revenue only nominally raised, supply-side economics had some very positive effects on America’s economy: inflation was reduced from 12.5% to 4.4%, and unemployment declined from 7.1% to 5.5%. Decreases in import and export taxes (tariffs especially) led to favorable trade arrangements with the rest of the world; the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement forged a stronger bond with Canada, and for the first time American trade in the 1980s, even during the Cold War, surpassed Europe’s.

 

Reagan was seen as a hero for ending the Cold War, but much of this can be attributed to the USSR’s implosion following incredible military spending and economic stagnancy. Reagan’s other foreign affairs were not as successful.

 

Approximately seven decades after the Panama Canal was completed, Reagan was faced with the problem of whether or not to return the canal back to the Panamanians, to whom the land rightfully belonged. Reagan believed that since American had paid Colombia war reparations, the canal was the property of the United States. General Noriega of Panama had worked as an informant for almost two decades before Reagan’s presidency, and amid disputes over the ownership of the canal, Reagan asked Noriega to step down. (Noriega was also a CIA informant during the Cold War, and answered to the CIA). Instead, Noriega seized power of the country, expanded the force of his military dictatorship, and cut ties with the U.S. Reagan sent multiple search missions into Panama, but could not locate Noriega. A large number of civilians were killed when Reagan sent hugely destructive missiles that had been produced during the military buildup of the Cold War after Noriega. Noriega eventually surrendered in Operation Nifty Package, where Navy Seals surrounded the church that he was hiding in. Reagan is often chastised by the political left for being too forceful in Panama and other countries such as Lebanon and Grenada.

 

Both Roosevelt and Reagan had their flaws, and these flaws are openly acknowledged by Gore Vidal and William Buckley.

 

Gore Vidal, like Roosevelt, was born into the upper echelon of society. His father, Eugene Vidal, worked for the Roosevelt administration as Director of Air Commerce from 1933 until 1937, and his grandfather was a senator from Illinois. Vidal had a close personal relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, who campaigned for him when he ran for Congress in 1960. But while Vidal adored Eleanor Roosevelt, his feelings for FDR were mixed. When asked about the relationship between the couple in a 2008 interview and which one he preferred, Vidal responded, “She admired him, but he didn’t admire her, which is stupid. She was much more intelligent than he.” Vidal has often criticized Roosevelt’s handling of World War II (which Vidal served in) as being too aggressive. Vidal has even accused Roosevelt of having prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attacks and not warning the bases so that America would be incited to enter the war. Vidal writes about Roosevelt,

 

“Having failed to persuade the American people to come to the aid of their beleaguered allies in Europe, his means of provocation was to deny Japan the oil and the scrap metal it needed to produce weapons for its defense industries.”

 

Vidal thought Roosevelt was too expansionist and imperialist, but agrees with his domestic policies:

 

“There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.”

 

Vidal also supports Roosevelt’s use of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes developed the idea that government involvement in the economy is necessary in times of recession. Roosevelt used this idea to justify increasing government’s role in the economy during the Great Depression. Like Roosevelt, Vidal believes that the country should evade deficit spending when the economy is not in a state of depression. Vidal even correctly predicted the economic meltdown of 2008 in a 2006 interview, and strongly opposes the Reagan policy of large military spending.

 

“Why is the blue-collar middle-class, middle American more willing to accept massive taxation and military spending for vague regional objectives rather than reasonable spending on social domestic issues that concern the entire nation?” he asks.

 

William Buckley had a more personal connection with the idol of his political party. As Lee Edwards writes,

 

“The Yale University graduate [Buckley] and the Eureka College alumnus [Reagan] had much in common: Each was tall (Reagan 6′1″, Buckley 6′2″), handsome, ambitious, a gifted speaker with a ready wit, an inveterate reader with an abiding interest in ideas, and a star in his profession. Each was a committed conservative — Reagan the zealous convert from liberalism, Buckley the cradle conservative. Each had a strong libertarian streak and viewed government as almost always the problem, not the solution. (One of the earliest and most important influences on Buckley was the libertarian author and social critic Albert Jay Nock.) Each was a fierce anti-Communist who believed that you could only trust the Communists to be Communists — although Reagan would come to believe that you could trust some Communists if you carefully verified their actions. A close friendship developed, reinforced by Nancy Reagan’s warm approval of Bill Buckley and his wife, Pat, who knew many of the same socially prominent New Yorkers she did.”

 

He and Reagan grew up on the American political scene together. They first crossed paths in 1968 during a debate on the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, which would grant Panama the Panama Canal by 1999. Buckley supported ratification while Reagan opposed it, saying that, “We paid for it. It’s ours.” The ratification of the treaty made Reagan realize something – that populism was the way to win a presidency, but intellectual populism was a way to create change in the world. As Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times:

 

“This is the principle lesson of the Buckley-Reagan relationship, as it played out across three decades — that populism doesn’t have to be stupid or bigoted, and intellectuals who wed themselves to populist figures don’t have to look like fools in the process. Intellectualism can stand up to populism when necessary, as Buckley did in his late-’70s debate with Reagan over the Panama Canal.”

 

Roosevelt and Reagan were able to create great political, social, and economic change during their times by making intellectual decisions that refused to be compared to those of another, previous President. They reshaped their party platforms not by opposing their party members, but by gauging and gaining the support of the people. Each realized the need for change and progression in politics. Vidal and Buckley are two modern intellectual giants that have carried on their leaders’ legacies. While it may appear that their reports on the country’s state have become more critical and even cynical as the years progress, this is a symptom – not a problem. The true problem with the American political scene today is politicians’ unwillingness to step over the lines drawn by Roosevelt and Reagan, when in fact it is what the two would have wanted.

 

February 9, 2012


ROBERT C

Morality and Perspective in Eudora Welty’s Flowers for Marjorie and A Memory

The great thinker Socrates once said, “A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” This statement of Socrates reflected his frustration with an Athenian legal system that the rest of the world saw as revolutionary – one that implemented the concepts of trial by jury and democracy in the court system. Why did Socrates disapprove of the system? It subjected the defendants in a case more to the “whims and capricious natures” of the common people and less so to the real and established laws: it deprived the litigants of due process of law. An excellent example of this was the philosopher’s own trial. Socrates expressed his distrust and disgust of a directly democratic system, and he was condemned not because he did anything truly wrong, but because he did something unpopular. He spoke out against the Athenian system, and was convicted of treason by a panel of biased Athenians when in fact he did nothing wrong. While Socrates was ultimately executed for his disloyal sentiment (and solely his sentiment) to the Athenian system, his lesson remained clear. Direct democracy, especially in the court system, could not, and would not work because of the unstable relative emotional values that the law would always be subject to. In a world where morality can be manipulated by peoples’ perceptions, justice will be lost amidst a sea of confusion. His prescient ideas about morality are certainly still applicable today.

Literature has played a significant role in influencing popular perception of laws, and of morality. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind both helped frame moral and legal issues that were pertinent to their respective time periods. Literature has the capability to create either perfect situations with which to highlight a moral dilemma, or to conjure murky circumstances with which to cloud the reader’s judgment. Eudora Welty was a 20th century American author. Welty mastered the art of framing a story by its narrative voice. This was done to the extent that she can hold a magnet to the moral compass of the reader and maneuver it in one way or another.

Welty poses many moral questions throughout her stories and frames them in clever ways, but what stands out is that in the end, each story seems to return to Socrates’ sentiment that relative emotional values, while they might be able to blur the line between right and wrong temporarily, must ultimately give way to the established right and wrong.

Eudora Welty’s story Flowers for Marjorie most adeptly frames the conflict between absolute morality and relative morality. From the beginning of the story, Welty highlights Howard, a discomfited southerner in Manhattan, She reveals his fragile state of mind through the third-person-limited narrative technique. The reader is introduced to the story while Howard is sitting on a park bench. His thoughts about his wife, Marjorie, suddenly “rise impossibly out of stagnation and deprecation … towering over his head, pounding … leaving nothing behind.” The severity of this description gives some background into the magnitude of the mental toll that Marjorie – who we haven’t even met yet – seems to have on Howard. As Welty introduces more of Howard’s life to us, we can further see the emotional challenge that he faces and ultimately succumbs to. The first time we see Marjorie in person, Howard looks at her “as if she were a mirage.” Marjorie is about to have a child, but Howard is not financially, mentally, or emotionally ready to take on the challenge of raising a human being. Welty writes that “there were times when Howard would feel lost in the one little room,” seemingly overwhelmed by the future.

When Howard sees a pansy that Marjorie has produced, he is filled with despair. The pansy is symbolic of Howard and Marjorie’s future, and especially, to me, of their baby. It fills Marjorie with pride, but frustrates Howard to the point where he feels the need to crush it. We also learn that Howard has recently moved, and has been out of work for a year. He exclaims, “Time isn’t as easy to count up as you think!” With this, Howard now seems not only lost in the present, but also detached from the future and the past: he is simply living in an expansive void that transcends both time and place. Out of this void, sparked by the pansy and Marjorie’s “inquiring into his hunger and weakness,” comes a “flash of lightning”: the narrator frames the story as if the knife that enters Marjorie seems perpetuated by Marjorie herself, with Howard barely conscious the entire time. After he kills his wife, Howard flees into the city, and is bombarded with both guilt and good fortune. He sees signs that compound his guilt – ones that show images of the Virgin Mary and ones that say “God sees you”, and he wins the lottery and the keys to the city in two strokes of luck. Howard wins these prizes that could have saved him and Marjorie, but it is too late.

Welty reinforces this conception of his being in a dream state. After Howard returns back to his apartment, he sees the clock that he had previously thrown out of the window in his confused fury. Time had literally shattered for Howard. “Everything had stopped.” Throughout the entire story, Howard had not been aware of what he was doing, and when he finally does come to his senses, he confesses his guilt immediately. He has been in a dream state, and now, “He [has] had a dream to come true.”

The narration seems to frames this murder of a wife and child as the act of an innocent man who couldn’t help what he was doing. The reader is torn on whether or not they should side with Howard. In the end, though, Howard surrenders to the policeman, and his fate is sealed. Welty shows with this story that even though relative morals can adapt to absorb any situation, absolute morals will always prevail. She uses the framing of the story to bend, but ultimately not break, our malleable moral alignments.

In another of her stories, A Memory, Welty shifts the narrative perspective. This story is in the first person: it seems to be a memoir, and with its personal, revealing, and emotional narrator, A Memory takes a confessional tone. The story starts with “One summer morning when I was a child”, and the narrator then admits to often creating a picture frame with her fingers, “to look out at everything,” much like Welty herself would have done, since both she and her father were avid photographers. The narrator seems to be looking back on her young self in a scrutinizing manner, admitting that “I was at an age when I formed a judgment upon every person and every event which came under my eye.”

The main character in both stories is almost unconscious until the moment that the main event hits them. Howard kills Marjorie from a state of confusion, and the narrator of A Memory notices the bathing family next to her after falling asleep daydreaming: “I did not notice how the bathers got there, so close to me.” She recluses herself from reality, “in the protection of her dream” and opts to occupy herself with her first crush, who she’s never even talked to. The narrator makes out the event of the bathing family arriving to be almost as grievous as Howard’s stabbing of Marjorie. And while the background that the third-person narrator gives on Howard leads us to sympathize with him, the background that the narrator of A Memory gives on herself has the opposite effect. Her confession that “love somehow made me doubly austere in my observations” seems more like an excuse to justify her subsequent descriptions. At the end of the story, the main character’s emotions border on the absurd. She lay there “feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bulwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around their bodies, which had changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm.”

Welty’s ability to subtly control the reader’s moral alignment is on full display in these two pieces. Marjorie, Howard’s wife and victim, and the family that arrive at the beach both act as foils, highlighting the absence of mind of the two main characters, as well as revealing their mental instability. Because these stories are framed by narrators that aren’t fully aware of their situations, the reader, too, is confused about which side they should take. Through her literary manipulation, Eudora Welty shows us how malleable our “relative emotional values” are. Overall, Welty’s message is that we can’t trust our relative emotional values to make our judgments.

February 4, 2012


OLIVIA S

I have just read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and I think it is a fabulous book. Madeleine L’Engle was born in 1918 and died in 2007. She was an American author known for her children’s books. Madeleine L’Engle wrote lot of different books such as Time Fantasy, A Wind In The Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and many others. I think A Wrinkle In Time is an amazing book, but there is a lot of suspense in it.

This book is set in a suburban family house, and the surrounding town, as well as on planets in our universe. The Murry family includes Sandy and Dennys, the twins, Meg, Charles, Mrs. Murry, and Mr. Murry. Mr. Murry is in a cosmically-situated jail called IT and Meg, Charles, and Meg’s friend, Calvin are trying to save him.  They travel to different planets to save him.

One of the three parts I thought were scariest, occurred in Chapter 11, Aunt Beast. I thought Aunt Beast was going to do something bad to Meg, Charles, and Calvin. I thought this because in the book, the beast told her, “Stop fighting … you’re making it worse – Relax.”

“That’s what IT said,” Meg cried. “Father, Calvin, Help!” When I finished the chapter, I was surprised because Meg and Aunt Beast actually became friends.

The second time was when Meg noticed that Charles disappeared! I was at the edge of my seat. I wasn’t willing to read the book for a week! I knew this because in the book it said “That isn’t Charles: Charles disappeared!”  Meg cried.

The third time was when Mr. Murry got sent to IT. I was at the edge of my seat. I thought IT was like a regular jail, so, I thought Mr. Murry was a horrible person because horrible people go to jail. I also started wondering how Meg and Calvin will save Mr. Murry if they didn’t have to key to unlock the door. At that time I thought IT was a regular jail but, once I realized IT was a cosmically–situated jail, I knew how Meg and Calvin could save him. I thought this, because in the book, it said, “The man in the column did not move to look at her.” I thought there was a transparent glass so the man couldn’t hear her.

I was scared most of the time when I was reading it, but overall, I was glad to finish it. A Wrinkle In Time’s 50th anniversary was January 7th 2012! Happy anniversary!

February 1, 2012


HELEN (HANYU) L

 Narrative Voices in Eudora Welty’s Stories

 

      “To be or not to be?” Hamlet’s cry, meaning to live on Earth through the pain and torture or, to instead leave and die, was a difficult dilemma faced by the Danish prince. This is similar to a writer’s choice in narrative techniques, or points of view, as the decision to reveal can be deadly to the prose, making the story either better or worse; so, when it comes to different types of narrative point of view, it’s more like … “to tell or not to tell?”

 

There are many choices available to an author in terms of narrative style, or narrative voice, and here are just a few: omniscient narration, selective omniscient, and dramatic monologue are some forms of narrative perspectives and determine how much of the story and its characters the reader is exposed to. Omniscient narration is when the narrator of the story has access to all the characters, knowing their thoughts and details that normally are unable to be felt or seen. Selective omniscient narration is when the narrator knows only one particular character well, while the others blur into the background, though this not necessarily makes them less important in the story. Dramatic monologue is when the character is the narrative voice of the story, and is speaking to someone in the environment.  Then there is multiple narrator, a first-person narration voice, telling the story by several different characters’ points of view. Another narrative voice is interior monologue, and this is when the narrator tells the story as a vivid memory without leaving out important details. Stories can also be written in the form of a letter or a diary entry and the narration used will be that of the personal and confessional.  Also, there is third-person limited, which is similar to selective omniscient except the narrator is a character in the story.  The narrator tells the story in a third person’s point of view, but sometimes informs the readers with his/her own experiences, feelings, and insights.

Eudora Welty, like many other fiction writers, utilizes many different kinds of narrative voices in a variety of stories. She wrote The Worn Path in selective omniscient, Livvie in omniscient, The Whistle in third person limited, and Why I Live at the P.O is a dramatic monologue. Some omniscient choices bring out the story, entertaining the readers while still keeping the suspense. However with other omniscient choices, the narrator seems to lack the awareness of characters’ emotions and reactions, weakening the connection between the readers and the characters. Overall, I reduced Welty’s stories to three levels of control in the information release of the narrator for the insights and emotions of the characters: tell all, tell most, or tell some.

Welty chose selective omniscient for “The Worn Path”, which is about one elder’s brave journey through the countryside in order to reach the nearest city that provided medicine her sick grandson needed. Her choice of using selective omniscient matches the plot of the story beautifully, for the readers gained access to the exact appearance of Phoenix Jackson: “Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark” (T.W.P., 4).  Like a little bird perching on her shoulder, the reader gets a close view of her mien and personality. In an interview with Beth Henley, Eudora Welty explained her inspiration for the story: “… In Jackson there were good many painters that I knew. I didn’t know any writers… And I used to go out with them [painters] when they were painting, into the countryside around, and I would sit there and read. I would have a good time. And I was doing that one day and I looked up in the distance … and I saw this figure moving across the, almost the horizon, the very end as far as I can see, of an old lady … make a slow way across the landscape and I could tell she was going somewhere. She wasn’t just out; she was, she had a purpose…”. Welty also said that she didn’t use the old lady as a source for a story immediately but instead, absorbed the image and landscape and eventually created “The Worn Path”. Also in the interview, Welty was asked about when Phoenix Jackson was already halfway through her journey when she said, “… something always take a hold of me on this hill—pleads I should stay.” Beth Henley asked, “What do you think is pleading for her to stay?” Welty replied with, “She has very serious things that pleads she should stay. I mean everything was against her doing this. I mean her old age, and her physical task was really beyond her and what she was doing. But it didn’t occur to her not to go. I mean the journey was some of a ritual that she did … ” Welty had a keen sense of Jackson’s weaknesses and chose a narrative voice that could highlight and show off the difficulties in the journey by reflecting Jackson’s fragile physical appearance and old age. Finally, not only does the appearance of Phoenix Jackson contributed to the overall feeling of the story, but the name Phoenix itself contains meaning. Welty said in the interview, “I think that name, of course it’s rather symbolic, but would not have done it except that … whenever I was writing Mississippi stories, I did things that were done here. I would read old county papers … and I noticed how many names in it, were classical names, … names handed down the family. Now you don’t hear names like that, but you did then… Latin names, names out of the bible, and all that. I knew she’d have a name like that… but then there was someone named Phoenix… but it’s a perfect name for her because… year after year she did it [made the journey]… but she rose again like a Phoenix … ” This made it clear that Welty wanted Phoenix to shine brighter than the other characters, because for starters, she is the only named character in entire story. Other than Phoenix Jackson, Welty didn’t give as close of a description of the other characters like the hunter with his dogs and the nurse, which allows the story to feature Phoenix Jackson. In The Worn Path, selective omniscient narration is suitable since Welty wanted to emphasize the character Phoenix Jackson rather than all the characters. (Not all characters are created equal!)

 

In Livvie, Welty used omniscient as the point of view. In Livvie, an old man, Solomon, married and took away a sixteen-year-old girl into the deep Natchez Trace and there they lived until the day that Solomon died. By using the omniscient voice, Welty was able to tell the fiction piece in a clear and entertaining way. However, though telling the story in an amusing way due to its strong story plot, the narrative voice felt rather unvaried and characterless since it did not reveal any of the character’s inner thoughts and emotions that could’ve contributed greatly for Livvie. The story would have been more interesting if it was told from a character’s point of view, or in other words, dramatic monologue, because the readers can get a sense of the characters’ thoughts and feelings. For example, Solomon is pictured sleeping upon a throne-like bed. However, all the description and imagery is directed towards his environment, rather than his appearance or dreams:

 

          Solomon had a houseful of furniture. There was a double settee, a tall scrolled rocker and an organ in the front room, all around a three-legged table with a pink marble top, on which was set a lamp with three gold feet, besides a jelly glass with pretty hen feathers in it. Behind the front room, the other room had the bright iron bed with the polished knobs like a throne, in which Solomon slept all day. There were snow-white curtains of wiry lace at the window, and a lace bed-spread belonged on the bed.

 

He seems to be in control of Livvie by not allowing her to go outside or visit her family. If the narrative voice of the story were partial to Solomon’s thoughts, the readers would know why he is being imperious, and empathically connect to his need to keep Livvie hidden deeply inside the Natchez Trace. On the other hand, if the story were told from Livvie’s point of view, the readers could discover her reaction and emotions when Solomon forbids her to associate with others, therefore allowing the reader to sympathize. Before Solomon took Livvie away, he asked her if she would be happy:

 Solomon asked her before he took her, would she be happy? – very dignified, for he was a colored man that owned his land and had it written down in the courthouse; and she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ since he was an old man and she was young and just listened and answered.

If Welty wrote the story in the point of view of Livvie, the readers could know what Livvie was thinking when Solomon asked her to take her away and what her family would say.

For “The Whistle”, Welty used third-person limited narrative technique. “The Whistle” is about the hard life of two planters who work under the fierce orders of a master. One winter the couple gave everything that they had in order to stay warm for the health of plants and ended up burning all their furniture away. For “The Whistle”, third-person limited is good since the main idea of the story was for the readers to feel the depressing mood and the pain and hardships that were faced in the story. Welty did a great job of creating a gloomy and painful feel that the readers can experience. Since the story is in third-person limited, readers, instead of focusing on all of the characters’ emotions and opinions, are more centered upon the senses and thoughts of just one character that can truly bring out the distress that the couple goes through. Using third-person limited narrative perspective is similar to selective omniscient since “The Whistle” focuses more on Sara, however the narrator is able to bring the readers into Sara’s thoughts, feelings, and even dreams. During the night, the readers get a glance Sara Morton’s dream; “There in her mind, dusty little Dexter became a theater for almost legendary festivity, a place of pleasure…” The readers can sense her longing for a jubilant surrounding and a happier way of life.

 

Welty used dramatic monologue for “Why I Live at the P.O”, creating a perfect humorous piece. “Why I Live at the P.O.” tells the tale of a sister arriving home with her unannounced child and the arguments she rouses. Sister, the character who’s telling the story, expressed her thoughts freely to herself, making the readers feel as if they were involved in the story. By using first-person, one can feel the sarcasm in the statements and Sister’s annoyance. Unlike from an omniscient or selective omniscient point of view, the readers tend to favor and support Sister; since after all, she is the one telling the story, therefore making her more persuasive. However, this doesn’t make Sister necessarily right all the time. The readers are unable to judge who is actually right since the narrator doesn’t choose to reveal both sides of the story, leaving the readers to believe more toward the side that is shown.

 

Welty’s stories finally conclude to three levels of control in the information release into the insights and emotions of the characters: what I’ll call tell all, tell most, or tell some. Tell all is omniscient, and the narrator lets the reader know every aspect of every character. It creates a feeling as if all the characters in the story are your best friends and, like old buddies, you notice more about their appearances and feel more empathy. Tell some is selective omniscient and third-person limited, where you only know and get insights on one character. Usually this form of control is used to make one character appear more significant though not lessening the role of the supporting characters. Tell most is dramatic monologue and usually is character driven. The narrator is a character in the story and by being part of the conflict, usually the narrator only reveals one side of the story – their side. Dramatic monologues have a persuasive voice since the narrator doesn’t tell the readers the thoughts and feelings of the other characters because he or she might not understand or know how they feel and react, thus leaving the readers with only their side of the story to believe.

 

Whether it is omniscient, selective omniscient, third person limited, or dramatic monologue, Welty covered them all, using the narrative voice creatively. No matter the perspective of her stories, all of her fiction pieces had a great flow and enlightened the readers with their exciting twists and turns. In the end, points of view are decided on one general question: to tell or not to tell?