Dec 26, 2009

Why I Live at the P.O. | Themes

This is probably Welty's funniest story. It takes up one of her most frequent themes, the community vs. the individual, or what Robert Penn Warren has described in Welty as "love and separateness." The older sister feels slighted by the attention Stella-Rondo wins, and sibling rivalry increasingly isolates Sister from the others. Thus, the moderately discerning reader looks beneath the story's surface humor and finds disturbing family conflicts and disfiguring scars. The more discerning reader, however, may recognize that the family feud and Sister's move to the post office are mainly...