An Analysis Of Characters From A Curtain Of Green And Other Stories

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) is widely considered one of the most important contemporary fiction writers in America. She grew up in the New South where modern consciousness pervaded. She learnt from southern literary traditions and modernist movement. As a promising young writer of Southern Renaissance, Welty inherited traditions of southern literature, and developed the artistic style and writing techniques of Modernism. Her works, especially the short stories, are considered the treasure of southern literature.As her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories established Welty's reputation as a short story writer and established the most distinguishing characteristics of her fictions as well. The sheer variety of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories was immediately impressive. They showed Welty's achievement of diverse talent. The stories varied in tone broadly and sometimes from absurd farce to delicate melancholy; there were stories of fairy-tale simplicity and fantasies of nightmare complexity, stories of greed, pride, horror, innocence, and love. She viewed the South from within and outside traditions. She was absorbed in the complexity of changing human relationships and like other southern writers, managed to repossess the past and in the way a person's past was woven into the present, with a sharp eye and ear for the details of the region.The stories were concerned largely with single moments of personal crisis. Although a strong sense of ordered community bound the setting of the stories together, it was the inner lives of the characters that interested Welty more than their public faces. She was more concerned with individual self-deception than with social hypocrisy. In Welty's Stories, in terms of characters'mental state, she always created two kinds of characters: normal characters and abnormal characters. Different mental states led to different behaviors and even different fates in the given settings of society and times.Welty conveys her view on the American southern society by observing common people, getting insight into their inner world, and describing their physical and psychological action. In Welty's mind, characterization is used to explore the theme of writing. So analyzing characters can help to achieve a better comprehension of themes. By characterizing common people, she probes into the problem of the transitional society. By analyzing the characters, a clear vision on the theme of Welty's writing can be achieved. The basic aim of this dissertation therefore is to interpret characters of Welty's short stories in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and achieve a better understanding of her themes.Structurally it is composed of an introduction, four chapters and conclusion: In Introduction, it is a survey of Welty's experiences of life and creation and a general introduction of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories to lighten the importance of Welty and her works in literature.Chapter One explores southern literary traditions, Modernism and their influences on Welty. It supplies the necessary background for understanding Welty's works. Chapter Two is a detailed discussion on features of normal characters. The features of the normal characters, especially their inheritance of southern traditional values and beliefs, give them sufficient energy to confront with the cruel, indifferent modern industrial society, and strengthen their way of life in the transitional times, so as to survive in hard life. Chapter Three focuses on features of freak characters. In contrast with the normal characters, features of the freak characters lead to their sad fate. Lack of communication makes their life fall into terrible trouble; lack of the love makes them more despaired and depressed; loneliness makes them more indifferent to life. Longing for love and being separated from love brings them hopelessness.Chapter Four deals with the significance of characterization—the purpose of characterization is to deepen the themes, so that we can get a better understanding of her works. Her concern was always with human dilemma, with man's failure or success in dealing with his own nature, with realities of the life within him and needs of those around him, with the problem in the conflict between tradition and modern in the transitional times.At last, according to the above analysis a conclusion for the whole thesis can be reached that in the struggle and under the background of the transitional society, the human beings are dehumanized, and the normal characters, who have a firm will, go on living, but the persons who are freak in spirit fall into a ruinous state.