Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant | Welty, Tyler, and Traveling Salesmen: The Wandering Hero Unhorsed
In the following excerpt, Manning argues that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant takes the familiar figure of the wandering adventurer and portrays him as "irresponsible, vain, and self-centered."
A familiar and appealing figure of the hero in narrative is that of the adventurer who wanders either alone or with male comrades in quest of some goal or in simple harmony with nature. He encounters heroic adventures along the way. The image has come down to us from Odysseus is seen in American fiction in a character such as James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, and has received wide circulation through western movie heroes such as Shane and the Lone Ranger. This hero is almost always unmarried and hence does not have the...
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