All stories can be segmented into a beginning, a middle, and an end. A route worn by Eudora Welty follows this pattern. At the beginning we meet the phoenix as he makes his solitary journey encountering various obstacles in the natural world such as a steep hill, thorns that get caught in his clothes, a log stretched across a stream, and a labyrinth. The mood of the story changes slightly with the introduction of the white hunter who helps her out of the ditch but also points his gun in her face. We can identify the interactions with the hunter as indicating half the story. Then, at the end of the story, the phoenix comes to the city of Natchez and takes his medicine from the clinic. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Segmenting the story in this way allows us to see the shape of the entire story at a glance. One of the aspects of the story that we can perceive in this way is if the journey of the phoenix seems to take place in three phases and in each phase of its journey different types of challenges. At first Phoenix faces the challenges of making his way in the natural world. So the introduction of the hunter presents her with the challenge of dealing with a world of other people. Then in the city he finds himself facing the challenges of society. This way we can look at the levels of obstacles that Welty represents in the story and see how the physical obstacles at the beginning of the story develop into the more complex obstacles such as racism, social stigma, and poverty described at the end. of history. The structure in a worn path we never see the phoenix at rest, we never see it at home, it is always constantly in motion. His whole story can be seen as an extended middle part with no beginning or end. It is always traveling, always suspended in the air. Reading the story this way emphasizes the open-ended quality of the story. The end of the story is not the end for Phoenix as he still has to do the entire journey in reverse for the return trip. The entire trip itself is also just one of many similar trips that Phoenix has taken in the past and that she will continue to take in the future. When we consider this aspect of the story, we might think of it as a story about time itself. The way we all live in the flow of an extended center. Of course the name phoenix alludes to the mythical bird that lives through cycles of destruction and rebirth. The very first sentence sets the story in December, the end of one year and the beginning of the next. In the morning, when time turns to night, it will move closer to today. Phoenix herself is described as a grandfather clock due to the way she walks with a limp between a heavy and light step. In this context, the phoenix itself appears to participate in the natural cycles of day and night. The phases of the moon and its seasons are as if she herself were a force of nature bound to a relentless orbit. Phoenix also appears as a human. We had said that a flat character is a character without complex motivations and Phoenix could be considered a flat character because all she seems to want throughout the story is to get medicine for her nephew, but reading the story more closely, her psychology appears to be more complex. “He received the nickel, then took the other nickel out of his pocket and placed it next to the new one. He stared intently at his palm with his head on one side", one of the clues that the phoenix is ​​not a stereotypical grandmother figure. It is his cunning steps of a penny from the hunter. when he sees the coin fall from the hunter's pocket, he puts cleverly two dogs against each other to distract the hunter so thatcan carefully collect the nickel in her pocket without being observed. We know that stealing is wrong and we know that the phoenix should be the protagonist, so the reader must invent a way to reconcile this apparent contradiction. Is it okay for the Phoenix to steal from the Hunter because he is a bigot and deserves to be exploited? Or does Phoenix's extreme poverty provide an excuse for his behavior? Or should we think of the phoenix as a combination of noble and ignoble qualities? This would be another way of saying that we should think of her as a human being, as a round character. In fact, at the end of the story he tells this penny again and compares it with another penny he received from the clinic attendant. The two nickels, the one he stole and the one he received through relatively honest means, seem to represent two sides of his character, recalling Phoenix's description in the first paragraph as a balance between heaviness and lightness. Another conflict that helps make Phoenix a well-rounded character is as he persists in his effort to get medicine for his nephew. At several points in the story she seems tempted to abandon the journey of the story altogether and sink into a restful death. At one point, sitting down to rest, she has a dream vision of a boy bringing her a slice of cake and she is happy to accept it. This ghostly vision seems to represent the fantasy of giving in to the temptation to interrupt the journey. Even more evident when a black dog slams her into a ditch, she lies down in the springy weeds and unable to get out seems resigned to remaining in this shallow grave indefinitely. It is fortunate that the hunter arrives and helps her, but the suggestion remains that the phoenix is ​​so old and so tired that the prospect of dying on its journey is not entirely unpleasant. Indeed, the frequency with which dream images intrude on Phoenix's reality suggests that she exists in a sort of borderland between consciousness and sleep, between life and death, providing another frame of reference for that balance between heaviness and lightness, Welty said she described in her initial description of her protagonist. The setting of the story, in the American Deep South, at some point in the first half of the 20th century, obviously plays an important role in the narrative. The lack of respect shown towards the Phoenix by the Hunter and attendance at the clinic is clearly meant to be understood in the context of the racial tension of the Jim Crow era. While we can think of Phoenix Jackson as a sort of eternal timeless pilgrim on a journey between life and death. He is also a particular individual with a particular relationship to American history. At the end of the story we learned that Phoenix never went to school because he was too old and that “surrender” meant that when the South surrendered at the end of the Civil War and the freed slaves were given the opportunity to get an education. Phoenix was already past school age. this revelation that Phoenix spent the first two decades or so of her life as a slave has a chilling residency in her statement in paragraph five "it feels like there are chains on my feet, it's time I got this far" literally Phoenix is ​​having a hard time climbing the hill and the difficulty of moving forward recalls the weight of the irons on the legs but the discovery that the phoenix was born a slave makes this passage more than a figurative discourse, it connects his struggles on this journey to the struggles he has faced throughout his life as a victim of slavery. The path takes on another meaning in Phoenix's difficult life journey. Please note: this is just an example. Get.