Another short story by Eudora Welty, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," features, as its main character, a traveling salesman for a Mississippi shoe company, R.J Bowman. Like Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in his postmodern play Death of a Salesman, R.J. Bowman, after covering the same territory for over a decade, suddenly becomes lost on his way to Beulah, then grows ill, sick, and finally, has an accident. Unwilling to ask anyone for help, or even admit that he has gotten lost R.J. Bowman suddenly finds himself approaching the precipice of ravine. Realizing his car is about to roll off the edge of the ravine, Bowman grabs his wares from his car, just barely in time before it slides over the edge. Luckily for Bowman, the car has fallen only into some grapevines, and he goes next to get help recovering his car. Fatefully, however, he soon must stop to rest. He is out of breath from the whole ordeal.

In all four of these short stories, Eudora Welty demonstrates her narrative power as both a humorist and a humanist. In each of them, there is a poignancy beneath Welty's colloquial, tragicomic voice. Dealing most often with the themes of loneliness, displacement, and isolation, Eudora Welty, implies, within each of these short stories, not only the frequent sadness and folly of the human condition, but also the reparative power of the human heart.

world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. . . . 

ral puzzling questions for the reader. Why are they so angry at Sister? Why does the whole family seem so similar in their outspoken eccentricity? Who, for that matter, might Sister's and Stella Rondo's own father be? And what is Uncle Rondo's exact relationship to them all?

As The Art Bin suggests, "Though the story is comic, its underlying themes are complex, concerning the tensions between family affiliation and independence, the relative nature of truth, and the insularity and uniqueness of life in a small southern community" ("Eudora: How a Southern Writer Came to Lend her Name to a Computer Program"). Existentially, Sister has not yet reached adulthood; instead she is, like Sarty, but without his emotional clarity, an adolescent trying to survive. The undertone of the story is in fact a serious one. It is about sibling rivalry, specifically, about one sister's efforts standing up for, and to potentially protect herself in ways her younger sister may not have done, or have been able to do. The story is also about communication - on many levels, i.e., the bantering but dead-serious quarrels, and all sorts of symbols of outside freedom- radios, letters, post offices-which in this story serve, ironically, to constrict the narrator. Eudora Welty deals, often, with the effects of communication: the words we say, the situations and meanings we perceive, what remains unspoken, to convey Sister's true motivations and fears. Here, the insular small town environment is more than just a setting- it represents the restrictive boundaries within which Sister must try to safely survive.

      the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead.  She

and even of her husband.  After Judge McKelva's funeral, alone in her family

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Approximate Word count = 2276
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)