'A Worn Path' is a curt story past the American author Eudora Welty (1909-2001), starting time published in the Southern Review in 1937 and reprinted in Welty's 1941 collection A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. 'A Worn Path' details the journey an elderly black woman makes into town one Christmas time, in order to get some medicine for her grandson.

Before we offer an analysis of this securely symbolic story, it might be worth recapping the plot.

'A Worn Path': plot summary

One cold Dec morning, an elderly black woman named Phoenix Jackson walks into town to get some medicine for her grandson. She is very old and the journey is fraught with obstacles. At i point, a black canis familiaris appears and, although she tries to shoo it abroad, the sudden advent of the domestic dog forces her to autumn into a ditch.

A white hunter appears and he helps her up, before going after the canis familiaris with his gun and his own dog. Phoenix hears shots fired, and steals a nickel from the man, which had fallen onto the ground without him realising. She pockets it before he comes back. He tells her she's besides old and fragile to be walking and so far and that she should get dwelling house, just she insists she must go into town.

When she arrives in town, all the Christmas decorations are up and a woman carrying presents passes Phoenix on the path. Phoenix asks the adult female to lace upwardly her shoe for her, and the woman does so. Phoenix goes to the hospital, where the bellboy initially mistakes Phoenix for a clemency case. Phoenix doesn't respond when asked who she is, until mention of her grandson (by a nurse who comes in and recognises her) all of a sudden jogs her retentivity. Information technology turns out that she regularly makes this journey into town to get some medicine for her grandson, who swallowed some lye several years ago and remains bedridden as a outcome. Phoenix says it is simply her and her grandson and she has to take care of him.

One time she has been given the medicine, she goes to leave, but the attendant gives her a nickel as it's Christmas time. She places it next to the nickel she took from the hunter she met on the path, and announces that she volition become and purchase a newspaper windmill for her grandson, equally he will not believe such a affair exists.

'A Worn Path': analysis

'A Worn Path' is a securely symbolic story, in which the 'worn path' is both literal and metaphorical. Phoenix – whose very name summons the mythical bird that rose from the ashes of its own funeral pyre – is ageing and frail, and the worn path of life has taken its toll on her, but she nevertheless undertakes this journey, which is symbolic in other ways too.

For example, some critics have suggested that Phoenix'due south journey is meant to call back the journeying into the underworld undertaken by a mythic hero in epic poems. Such a journey is, for obvious reasons, a descent: a journey down into the chthonic space where the souls of the dead are found. Usually, the hero who undertakes such a journey is seeking to detect someone: Odysseus, in Homer's Odyssey, wishes to seek Tiresias the seer, who tin prophesy how the hero's quest will unfold; Orpheus goes into Hades to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice; and so on. Phoenix is similarly on a quest, and, perhaps surprisingly, the quest she is undertaking may non be the search for a medicine for her grandson but for her grandson himself.

How can that exist, when he is bedridden at home? One of the questions which the ending of 'A Worn Path' raises is whether Phoenix's grandson is, in fact, already expressionless. Although she denies this, at that place are some suggestions that he has already passed away from his illness: the repeated references to how the grandson's throat 'never heals' and how 'obstinate' his condition is tin be read as deliberately cryptic, hinting at either a chronic and constant illness or Phoenix'southward refusal to take that her grandson died of his ailments some time agone. It also seems strange that Phoenix should forget why she had undertaken such a difficult journey, if her grandson's wellness is truly dependent on receiving such life-preserving medicine.

Instead, Welty hints at an culling interpretation, whereby 'A Worn Path' is the story of a adult female's psychological inability to surrender her last living relative, and accept that he is, in fact, dead and she is now all lone. (As she has the responsibility of fetching his medicine, the male child'south ain parents, we deduce, are either absent or dead.) She performs this ritual on a regular basis, and the people at the hospital humour her out of charity, seeing how of import this journey is for Phoenix, and mayhap even suspecting that it is the only thing that keeps her going, providing a reason to go on living.

The journey may be fraught with physical hardship, but the alternative is to give up altogether. The 'worn path', then, might be itself a metaphor for life: living is hard and nosotros will detect our fair share of obstacles and dangers lying in wait for united states, but the culling is not to walk the path at all.

Given how invested with symbolism 'A Worn Path' is, the last words – which describe another kind of 'descent', equally Phoenix walks down the stairs, 'going down' – complicate and even problematise the more optimistic meaning lurking within her name. She may be likened to a phoenix – a bird which rises from the ashes of its ain funeral pyre – and this may imply that she will keep on going, no matter what. But has something changed during this particular journeying and her encounter in the hospital?

Why does Welty focus on this journey: is information technology because it is the concluding fourth dimension she will ever walk that worn path? Note how she non simply forgets what she is doing there, simply grows vacant, not even acknowledging the nurse'due south questions. Has she finally realised he is no longer alive, and is she finally letting go? And if so, do those last words imply that she is ready to 'go downwards' herself, and descend from this life into the adjacent?