SOURCE: "Place Dissolved In Grace: Welty's Losing Battles," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 39-53.

[In the following essay, Walter discusses Welty's Losing Battles.]

The more one gets to know Eudora Welty's characters and to observe her construction of worlds in words and images, the more difficulty one has in seeing a division between objective and subjective, outward and inward. Her physical locales, though faithful renderings of the world's appearance in convincing visual detail, are always also figures of the thought, emotions, and dreams of her characters and narrators; and usually what wisdom her characters achieve is by way of imaginative awareness of their place as a reflector of their own and time's deepest secrets. Welty's characters typically begin in their stories with attitudes or beliefs settled in routine or tradition and sometimes hardened by a defensiveness resulting from experience of losing battles with life. Despite their accommodation, however, life turns out for them in much the same way that Judge Moody in Losing Battles says it turned out for Miss Mortimer: "What she didn't know till she got to it was what could happen to what she was." What can "happen" is hardly ever what was anticipated nor is it ever very securely within human control; rather it unfolds at the prompting of a mysterious shaping spirit alive in particular conjunctions of place, event, and human purpose. The action of this gracious spirit can be read in its dissolution of old and settled perspectives, its opening of minds and hearts to others, and its promotion of new more inclusive communities.

In Losing Battles, Welty's characters, almost despite themselves, are being gradually transformed by some dissolving and annealing power in time—a power that might be called grace, because of its gratuitous and generally sanctifying effect. What finally happens to most of the actors in Welty's novel is analogous to what Moody expresses when he says, in responding to a mood sent him in the air, that Miss Mortimer's life-story "could make a stone cry." Somehow, by virtue of a power laboring in the very body of the world, this human transformation comes out of the very stone—through inevitable experience that while threatening to harden feeling can also temper a capacity for sympathy.

The main action of Welty's novel, one sees by opening to almost any page, is constant talk among the numerous members of three related families—Vaughn, Beecham, and Renfro—gathered to celebrate a family reunion in the Mississippi hill country during the hard times and drought of summer 1930. Physically unifying and defining the place is its atmosphere: in the oppressive heat of Sunday, day of the reunion, a thick veil of pinkish dust raised from the red clay by any movement of man, beast, or vehicle covers almost everything; on Monday morning, after a night of full moon, a fine gentle rain muddies but also slowly cleans everything, leaving the earth bright for the farmers who must return to labor on it for their livelihood. Emotionally the unity of this world is disclosed in the metaphoric connotations of the dust, moon, and rain. Like the dust that obscures vision, an emotional defensiveness initially confines the family, causing them as a matter of habit to seek safety by joining together against outsiders. The dusty atmosphere figures the condition of their hearts as a result of their frustrations in trying to live off barren soil, their resentment at Jack Renfro's unfair imprisonment and the stain it put on the family name, and their trepidation at human mortality, clear in the condition of Granny Vaughn and in numerous signs attending the reunion. If the dust figures mortality obscuring and covering all that is not vital enough to oppose it, the long-awaited rain, even as it spoils hay left on the ground after cutting, signifies, at the novel's end, a fresh and hopeful spirit in the protagonists as they return to their everyday life and work. The evolution of the novel's world, thus, follows the movement of comedy, from seeming hopelessness in a wasteland state toward affirmation of all that lives; the resolution, assisted by outside help, is in the discovery of the best order of loves and motives within the self, family, and community.

This affirmative spirit is already present but concealed within the words and images of the novel's first paragraph:

When the rooster crowed, the moon had still not left the world but was going down on flushed cheek, one day short of the full. A long thin cloud crossed it slowly, drawing itself out like a name being called. The air changed, as if a mile or so away a wooden door had swung open, and a smell, more of warmth than wet, from a river at low stage, moved upward into the clay hills that stood in darkness.

The general sense of this opening scene is of a new world being announced by the rooster's crowing. The auditory image is followed by a visual one, the moon's "flushed cheek," the first of many images in which nature seems to reflect a human form. Next, the visual leads the auditory in a synaesthetic image: the cloud drawn out "like a name being called" is a visual object which its viewer perceives as speech. The connection between the second and third sentences seems almost causal, as if "hearing" nature's speech awakens the percipient's other senses to smell and feel the life in the very flesh of earth. In its progression, the description of this scene foreshadows the conclusive shape of Losing Battles and the effect of its completed story on most of its participants, including the reader.

The novel is narrated by an implied author who seems, at times, to speak as the meditative and prophetic spirit of the place, knowing its people and teaching them somehow before they know it, but eventually being that which is known by its more perceptive inhabitants. A major intention of this author is to show that a remarkable world waits to be seen, and to make the reader see it despite all the obscuring influence of dust, self-love, fear, and passivity. The need to see and be seen, nevertheless, insofar as it compels a search for security in the relative fixedness of visible signs and objects, is submitted to a critique in this novel. Human realization requires also a certain openness and venturesomeness regarding the unseen, which is often only heard or intuited. The illusoriness of stability sought in the seen world is emphasized near the middle of the novel, just after the family, in a gesture to repress answers to painful questions raised by the newcomer Cleo about Nathan's "play hand" and about "Handsome" Sam Dale, unite in visible solidarity to sing "Gathering Home." Following this attempt by the family to divert the flow of talk, the narrator comments,

As they sang, the tree over them, Billy Vaughn's Switch, with its ever-spinning leaves all light-points at this hour, looked bright as a river, and the tables might have been a little train of barges it was carrying with it moving slowly downstream. Brother Bethune's gun, still resting against the trunk, was travelling too, and nothing at all was unmovable, or empowered to hold the scene still fixed or stake the reunion there.

Like the Bywy River flowing at the edge of the known world in this novel, the flowing river of time constantly disturbs the stability of the visible and whispers of a mystery that is out of eyesight.

The surprising analogies in this description of "Billy Vaughn's Switch," which is typical of the diction, tone, and style of the lyrical inscriptions throughout the novel, over-whelm the visual sense, inhibit its tyrannizing drive to literalize objects, while stimulating among all the reader's senses a collaboration that intensifies awareness of variety and relation. By compelling the reader to engage in imaginative play with different visual possibilities, it communicates to a deeper human sense, stirring recall of the easily forgotten unity that mysteriously knits the diversity of things.

The imagery of the opening of Losing Battles implies the possible rejuvenation of the dry land of its world. The family's hope is represented in the posture of Granny as she sits at the edge of the Renfro porch watching for the reunion to begin and especially for the "joy" of the family, Jack Jordan Renfro, to return from prison. All the family anticipates the resurrection of their fortunes as soon as Jack takes up their battles again; but they look for change according to the old law of "the way we do it in Banner": "Well, Curly skinned Jack's ear, and Jack had to skin Curly's ear, and so on."

It is significant that Mr. Willy Trimble helped Mr. Renfro put on the new roof after Jack's departure for prison and that the old man has since "taken liberties" by "scurrying and frisking around" at will over the family's head. Trimble is an odd figure. Miss Julia Mortimer taught him carpentry so he could make the mailboxes essential to her mail-order nursery, but he has perversely turned his skill to coffin-making. He shows up where least expected—in front of Judge Moody's car forcing him off the road; at Julia Mortimer's when she is dying, to help her from the road into her bed and to respond with a blank look to her last question; and later, as an immovable although unwelcome guest at the main table of the reunion. In school the other children had dubbed him "Willy Trimble?—Hope Not!" Brother Bethune calls him "the biggest old joker in Christendom!" He is in a mysterious way a personification of earthly contingency, contrariety, and death, realities the reunion intends to keep at arm's length by its garrulous self-satisfied optimism.

When Jack first arrives home, he patiently indulges his family and enjoys their attention; but when cousin Homer Champion arrives to ridicule him for stopping on his way home to help the wrong man get his car out of a ditch, Jack's vengeance is aroused. The fallen state of the family is fully revealed as goading by Champion perverts their inherited spirit of heroic independence into a refusal to help or accept help from someone who, they believe, has no business being "in our part of the world." Jack may be back within the family circle, but his recent prison experience and his love awakened at first sight of his infant daughter make him a fresh seed unfolding there, preparing a transformation of the family's horizon from within. When Jack graciously offers to help Moody a second time after the Judge swerved his car off the road to avoid hitting Jack's wife and baby, Jack's repudiation of the clan's mechanical system of vengeful justice promises eventual change for all of the family.

The family and the community's habitual tendency to blame others and retaliate, or simply to ignore outsiders, is shown in a humorous variety of ways through the middle of Losing Battles. An exaggerated type of the whole community appears in the Broadwees, a tribe of Jack's neighbors who come marching single-file up Banner Road eating watermelons shortly after the Judge's car has reached a precarious perch on Banner Top. The Broadwees possess hardly enough difference among themselves to need first names. Their last name tells everything about them: their absorption by family has so "broadened" their outlook to "we" that personal sight and responsibility largely escape them. Their response to the Moodies' plight is merely to sit down in rows to watch while finishing their watermelon. Their speech is little more than "Boo! Boo! Boo!"—a sound they make in habitual unison against rivals during Banner basketball games and, at the present moment, their only available utterance to express their pleasure in the antics of Lady May.

Like their speech, the watermelons eaten by the Broadwees suggest a great deal about the simple corporate myth they live by. Physical similarities between this fruit, the land it grows on, and the people who eat it are repeatedly stressed throughout the novel, as if some alimentary vein passing through the watermelons connects these people with the soil. For example, we are told that Banner Road runs deep between "banks that were bright as a melon at that instant split open." Later, Mr. Renfro's gesture of splitting watermelons to give to each girl "the bursting red heart to drown her face in" suggests the sensual immediacy of this clan's relation to the natural world, quite different from the imaginative distance imposed by the written letters on the tablets of Moses, with which the melons are compared. The family's initiation of Jack's wife, Gloria, in an attempt to absorb her into their sphere is logically enacted by their concerted effort to force her to eat a hulk of watermelon "shoved down into her face, as big as a man's clayed shoe, swarming with seeds, warm with rain-thin juice."

The melon's color, of course, repeats the pink-to-red tinge of almost everything in the Banner world—its people, the flowers, the dust-filled sky, dust-covered objects, the tender skin of babies, even the well water. But like most natural symbols, the melons radiate multiple and ambiguous significance. On the one hand, they suggest a round and smooth containment, a type of limited, rind-covered life; but on the other hand, their bright meat and myriad seeds, visible when the melons are cracked open, symbolize a hidden power of nourishment and generation in nature. This most abundant fruit of the place contains a hidden life-potential that has its emotional and spiritual analogues in the people of the novel's world. For instance, when Lexie Renfro, the bitter old-maid nurse of Miss Mortimer, arrives at the reunion wearing a hat she borrowed from her patient's closet and bringing food she prepared out of her patient's pantry, these slight reminders of Miss Mortimer become seeds that will yield fruit by the end of the day. Like Jack, but with different meaning, the schoolteacher is a fertile presence in the family's consciousness waiting on something to quicken its growth.

Lexie's hatred of Miss Mortimer and envy of Gloria, a concentration of the family's more reserved feelings, are the activators which more Lexie to begin altering Gloria's oversized dress to the accompaniment of a story she tells detailing her patient's stages of senility. Lexie's aim is to render Gloria totally public and thereby settle her identity according to type in the family myth. At the same time, she attempts to reduce Miss Mortimer to those elements in her personality, sadly exaggerated in old age, which made her seem an ogre beyond the pale of human communion. One effect of Lexie's ventilation of spite is to arouse the ire of Judge Moody, who all along has been listening in an old school chair and getting an education in the ways of these people. When he first speaks, the Judge's motives are no less vindictive than theirs, since he intends to be the agent of their comeuppance. He too had been taught by Miss Mortimer in her prime, and before disabling his car had been on the way to see her in response to a letter she had sent him a month earlier. The Judge's speaking up at this moment, with support from written "documents" he carries and one provided by Mr. Trimble, initiates what appears to be a radical break from the mode of mythologizing and caricaturing engaged in thus far by most of the representatives of the family. The Judge assumes a demythologizing attitude, telling them, "Your memory's got a dozen holes in it. And some sad mistakes." To a large degree, Moody appears to uncover successfully the thought behind the strange behavior of Miss Mortimer that Lexie had so unsympathetically described.

Lexie's most interesting and, to the family, baffling information had to do with her patient's peculiar demands in her final isolation. When she had called for "her book," Lexie thwarted her by answering, "I don't know which book you mean." The last earthly possession the schoolteacher was able to use was her pencil, with which she wrote rapid letters of indictment against human nature. According to Lexie, she was quiet only when given the pencil: "Like words, just words, was getting to be something good enough to eat. And nothing else was!" In her compulsion she wrote on everything at hand and then crammed it "in the envelope till it won't hold one word more!" On the coverboard of the speller that Mr. Trimble had found, "ungiving," beneath Miss Mortimer's pillow when he placed her in bed, the schoolteacher had etched the combined words M-Y-W-I-L-L. Inside the book, handwriting overlays some of the spelling pages and extends over the margins. It appears that with her last strength Miss Mortimer attacked even the common language, projecting over it according to her own morphology a gloss of her indomitable will. The white space of the margins, which in a text symbolizes the unsaid meaning beyond the words, she assaulted for its intimidating threat to her domineering spirit.

Miss Mortimer, the picture suggests, pitted her life to its end in resolute struggle against all that resisted the sovereignty of her will. Her habitual mode of being was combat—with ignorance; with all that is illogical and unsystematic, particularly the prejudice constitutive of family and community; with nature; and finally with God. As she revealed in the last pitiful question of her life, addressed ironically to the ignorant Mr. Trimble—"What was the trip for?"—she had subordinated her combat's purpose to the sheer exhilaration of engaging it for its own sake. The substance of Miss Mortimer's will, as paraphrased by Judge Moody since the family refuses to be read to, is that they are all "constituted her mourners."

After he reads the will, the Judge's ultimate gesture to try to humble the family, by showing them evidence of a nobility of soul contrasting to their pettiness, is to read to them a letter he had received from Miss Mortimer. The letter includes an illuminating admission: "What I live by is inspiration. I always did—I started out on nothing else but naked inspiration." Recounting her inspired "war with ignorance," Miss Mortimer tells how she managed to turn each defeat, even "on the brink of oblivion" and crawling "along the edge of madness," into a lesson to take her "another mile" ahead. Evidently her inherited Presbyterian belief in Providence had undergone a warp at some stage in her thinking, causing her to posit something like a Darwinian life-process that, through testing creatures in a struggle for survival, provides them in itself a "measure of enjoyment." Experience of loss and failure in her life had for her the single effect of inspiring more heroic determination and effort. Thus, for her, "providence" was only something she had marched boldly to meet in the future, never something to discern in her memory of a past. Even in backing her car when she was younger, she had looked straight ahead, to the jeopardy of whoever happened to be behind her.

Miss Mortimer had proved equal to everything life could throw in her path until the very last when a "puzzler" confronted her: "Something walls me in," she writes, "crowds me around, outwits me, dims my eyesight, loses the pencil I had in my hand." She avows distrust of this unexpected other that exerts its power at concurrent limits of life and of language. In part, the "something" appears to have been her physical frailty as death began to claim her; but the barrier she describes was also mental and spiritual, imposed within the border of her linguistic horizon. Her reliance on a literal exactitude as her mode of understanding human experience incapacitated her for passage or vision beyond the border. An aunt's earlier comment concerning Miss Mortimer's habit of licking her pencil as she furiously wrote suggests the danger in her determination: "I've heard that licking an indelible pencil was one sure way to die." The schoolteacher's effort always to cast words into absolute statement that dispelled mystery, as a way to gain human certitude in time, had only the ironic effect of strengthening the prison-house of her existence. Moreover, because she looked on language and time only as raw material for her shaping will, she neglected to prepare for her own inevitable appropriation by time's sentence. When her final helplessness made her dependent on others, she knew only enough to scorn her fate with vain words: "Is this Heaven, where you lie wide-open to the mercies of others who think they know better than you do what's best—what's true and what isn't? Contradictors, interferers, and prevaricators—are those angels?… I think I'm in ignorance, not Heaven."

Her emotional life stifled by her rationalist presuppositions, the schoolteacher had attempted to be the active scourge of the non-rational ties of others. As a result, all her possibly fecund experience of tragic failure and negation, which could have taught her understanding of her human fate and her need for others and for mercy, was reduced by her to a sterile challenge having only the effect of increasing her for her undoing. Although the report of her last moment is given by Mr. Trimble, probably an untrustworthy observer, the spareness of it compels wonder: Did Miss Mortimer go out into the road to seek the communion she had missed, or did she go out for one last battle with backwoods ignorance?

Despite her addiction to writing, Miss Mortimer had actually based her existential outlook on a kind of antinomian orality. Her Emersonian (and Nietzschean?) "inspiration" suggests a conviction of self-reliant presence informing a strong will to contend. Miss Mortimer's writing, then, was only an instrument of her inspiration, a means of extending her conviction of sovereignty over the disorderly and contingent. The attitudes of the family, in contrast, despite its dependence on the spoken word, imply an ultimate reliance on a primary writing. At the reunion there are no isolatoes; all are in a sense copies of each other and conceive of themselves as copies of archetypes made by a first creator. Their orality is simply a confident performance of a ritual according to the script naturalized by tradition. As optimists concerning the continuity of human experience and the integrity of nature under a God whose intentions are conceived as relatively transparent, they each act their parts with a minimum of questioning or wonder; and they expect others to accept instruction and follow suit. Their oral self-display, apart from the pure pleasure of imitation it provides, is rhetorical in purpose, directed to outsiders who are slow to understand their ways. The danger in this outlook is in the tyrannizing potential of the letter, in the cultural idolatry that grows on love of the exterior of signs and forgets the renewable spirit that first called them into being. In Losing Battles, there is evidence that the family's pleasurable garrulity is, to a degree, a cover for a more elemental uncertainty and fear of ambiguity; preoccupied as they are with their public ritual, they fail on a more personal level to face and do battle with enemies of the interior world.

Deficiencies in Miss Mortimer and the people of Banner are emphasized in this analysis, perhaps to the point of obscuring virtues, because I think it is important to see clearly why and how, in the early parts of the novel, the combatants are confined, are in a real sense "lost." Despite their good qualities, all the Bannerites are initially stymied by psychological and spiritual faults. But to mark their deficiencies is also to make more explicit the re-creative power that, by the story's end, transforms most of them, miraculously. The comic effect of the novel is increased by our seeing that these sinners can be changed.

History's distinctive theme of "something new" is evident in Judge Moody as the completion of the story of Miss Mortimer brings him mysteriously to a clearer view of his own life and to a humble admission: that he "never fully forgave her" for her domineering influence in his life, that he didn't do all his "duty" by her, and that he cherished against her the advice she gave him years ago not to pursue success elsewhere but to remain in Boone County and devote his life to using the power of the courts to educate its stubborn people. The Judge's activated guilt and his deep grief for the poor woman illustrate his improved imagination. His concluding interpretation of Miss Mortimer is perceptive: "She knew exactly who she was. What she didn't know till she got to it was what could happen to what she was. Any more than any of us here know." Paradoxically, Moody's sorrowful recognition of contingency and the pathetic finitude of human knowledge does not lead him to despair, but it prepares him for hopeful participation, with less self-consciousness, in the comic resolution of Losing Battles.

There are numerous other signs that telling and hearing Miss Mortimer's story, in some ways the story of each one at the reunion, has animated the imaginations of all involved. In a beautifully wrought passage, the lyrical voice of the narrator describes what had been the dust of day as a "deep blue dust that now reached Heaven"; moments later the narrator describes a fine "substance" of moonlight sifting down "upon the world." For the first time this day, as "Silence that was all one big question opened like a tunnel," the participants open together in receptive wonder to an atmospheric memory that feeds their negativity and makes it fruitful.

This power felt by the participants of the reunion is most magnificently displayed by the narrator in the one passage in the novel admitting us fully into the interior of a character, as if this grace of imagination could be demonstrated only in the relatively silent and image-filled place of an individual psyche. The psyche used is the particularly sensitive one of Vaughn Renfro, twelve-year-old brother of Jack and general sufferer of the family's abuse and neglect. If the deceased schoolteacher had made school, book, and writing instruments of mortification, then Vaughn's love of school and especially of "geography" (study of the earth as a script?) suggests the possibility of imagination's rescue of culture's writing from its tendency to kill life by fixing it rigidly in abstract system. In contrast to the narrow and vindictive mythologizing that earlier had diverted the family from truth, the inspired mythopoesis that is filtered through Vaughn's consciousness discloses all the obvious, subtle, multiple, and necessary interpenetration of humans with their place and time and the significance they give to each other. What Vaughn perceives as, astride the mule Bet, he listens with ears funneled by an oversized hat he inherited from Grandpa Vaughn, is quite literally a voice myriadly incarnated in many voices "heard" through the world's visible body; the synaesthetic articulation of this voice is similar to that of the "could like a name being called" in the novel's opening paragraph.

[Vaughn] heard every sound going on, repeating itself, increasing, as if it were being recollected by loud night talking to itself. At times it might have been the rush of water—the Bywy on the rise in spring; or it might have been the rains catching up after them, to mire them in. Or it might have been that the whole wheel of the sky made the sound as it kept letting fall the soft fire of its turning…. It was all-present enough to spill over into voices, as everything, he was ready to believe now, threatened to do, the closer he might come to where something might happen.

Like the cosmos that "defies" Vaughn's honest soul at this moment, this passage gathers, states, intimates, and resonates in ways that defy systematic analysis. It tells of a universe that is in its essence an act of communication. It tells of the person's essential privacy and need to share understanding. It tells that meaning registers chiefly through the intuitions and images held in the heart, and that in any single act of knowing a multitude of mysterious qualities in being escape rational focus to hover at the edge of awareness. It tells of a multitude of emotions aroused in the knower, who needs to visualize, to speak with others, and to write in order to gain enough distance from experience and sound not to be absorbed by them. It hints of a grace operative in history and place, which may well be the writing of a divine Author whose book is read best by the innocent eye and the pure heart. And it reveals that, although reading by mortals is at best approximate and therefore inadequate, experience of negation can be fecund. The passage, thus, is a beautiful coda of Welty's obsessive concerns, not only in this novel but in all the fiction she has written.

If at first glance Vaughn's vision appears as a mandala in the Eastern tradition of mysticism, closer inspection uncovers its dependency on Western sacred literacy. In imagery, theme, and inspiration this passage and its context correspond with Ezekiel's astounding apocalypse of rolling wheels, storm, glimmering light and fiery flashes, roaring waters, compound beings, and battle-like sounds. Just as the prophet received his mission through his empathy with Israel's exilic suffering, so is Vaughn made to experience, in a similar imaginative setting, his connection with a transcendent holiness and purpose signified to him through the awesome creation. The further similarity that Vaughn takes things in "like a word … being swallowed," much as Ezekiel was made to eat the scroll the Lord gave to him, should make clear the continuity between Welty's rendering of Vaughn's experience and Judaeo-Christian understanding. The scroll that Ezekiel ate is a symbol of the "firmament" first described in Genesis and later allegorically interpreted by Augustine to be a scroll of signs stretched over the waters and the earth to raise forgetful human beings out of the deep of their separation from God's love. As illustrated in Vaughn's visionary experience, Welty's characteristic technique vis-a-vis traditional symbols is to re-create them in a way that respects their original power to generate fresh perceptions of truth yet avoids their tendency to become literal in abstract concept or doctrine.

That this powerful vision is filtered through the consciousness of Vaughn elevates him to special status in Losing Battles. His fertile gift of imagination is metaphorically indicated in the narrator's description of him feeling loved objects, such as the Banner school bus, "on his tongue, like a word of his own ready to be spoken, then swallowed back into his throat, going down, inside and inside." It is unimaginable that any other member of the family would swallow a word; but for Vaughn words are not so much a medium of ritualistic performance as they are mediators of a knowledge that joins rational apprehension and interior awareness. The active quality of Vaughn's imagination is evident in his translating an owl's cry he hears as "Who cooks for you? / Who cooks for me?"—questions that ponder the manifold interdependence of man, beast, earth, and provider. Vaughn's difference from the family is clarified as he unexpectedly meets Granny at the door to her room after all the others have fallen asleep; when she, in somnambulistic indiscriminateness, invites him to "Take off your hat … And climb in wi' me," he flees the house, telling himself, "She didn't know who I was … She didn't care!" Because the family mythos so thoroughly informs Granny's sight, she hardly cares who comes to sleep in her bed so long as it is family. Vaughn, however, feeling painfully the family's oppression of the private and personal, runs to the barn where he tumbles to the floor asleep while saying his prayers. The association of Vaughn in this scene with the prophet-like Baptist preacher Grandpa Vaughn, who often filled "the upper regions" of the same barn with prayers in behalf of the family, implies the re-creation in the boy of an archetype of critical consciousness that the family, because of its naturalizing habit, but dimly remembers.

At the conclusion of Losing Battles, Jack Renfro attempts to call his white horse Dan, loose from the pasture of Curly Stovall, who had appropriated the horse in Jack's absence as payment for the Renfros' new tin roof. To save pain, the family had lied to Jack that the horse had been "rendered"; thus Jack is elated as he witnesses it in a "few bright minutes" running "lightly as a blown thistledown" all around Banner. The imagery portraying the horse implies the revelation of a spirit in it; its name and color, furthermore, associate it with Daniel and Revelation, the chief apocalyptic books of the Old and New Testaments. Whatever it stands for, the horse's escape from Curly's lot signifies its opposition to the insecurity which compels the pharisaical storekeeper to cut off other men's shirt-tails for display in his store, gestures calculated to win glory from a seeing world. In contrast, Jack draws the reader's admiration as the novel ends because he has kept faith in an ideal of honor that is personal yet still binds him to others in gracious justice and charity.

The description of Jack's pursuit of Dan includes a pun suggesting Welty's pursuit of elusive truth in her fiction. Gloria tells Jack, "Dan is fickle. And now he's Curly's horse and he's let you know it. Oh, Jack, I know you'd rather he was rendered!" "No," Jack replies, "I rather he's alive and fickle than all mine and sold for his hide and tallow." Truth of the sort Welty reveals in this novel, of human life whose self-made terms of placement are being continuously dissolved by a re-creating grace, is also fickle; any Mortimerian writer's attempt to "render" it with total visual clarity, leaving no margin for the play of words and their connotations—and the play of the reader's active imagination—would indeed "render" this truth to its "hide and tallow." Consequently, throughout her fiction Welty characteristically avoids the hard edges of exact description, relying instead on diction that retains the ambiguity of real experience, on mind-stretching and mixed figures of speech, on hilarious hyperbole and timely silence, and sometimes on an unsettling profusion of visual images that break the tyrannizing control of the reader's eye and thus allow the essence, for a moment, to disclose itself.

In the comic conclusion to Losing Battles Jack is shown returning to his farm with his wife and baby behind him on the mule ambiguously named "Bet." He sings a Protestant song of harvest that illustrates once again Welty's amazing ability to combine several levels of meaning in a single action. The song, "Bringing in the sheaves, / Bringing in the sheaves!" in echoing a Biblical hope borne by exiles ("Those that sow in tears shall reap rejoicing … shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves"), anticipates a joyous fulfillment ("a Son of Man wielded his sickle over all the earth and reaped the earth's harvest"). The word "sheaves," moreover, which conflates pages with bundles of grain, suggests the novel's own work of discerning a voice in the signifying bodies of earth and of collecting its own sheaves into the credible and significant wholeness of a book whose multiple visual signs mediate that voice. Beyond this volume of temporal writing, Welty suggests, and validating whatever truth it may publish, is that other volume noted in Revelation, the "book of the living" whose pages accumulating over the ages are read by their divine author.

It is appropriate, then, that Jack's song echoes the moment in Dante's Paradiso when the poet sees, in eternal light,

     All things in a single volume bound by Love,
     of which the universe is the scattered leaves.
                                        (Canto XXXIII)

As its title implies, however, Losing Battles is not paradisal or high comedy. Its tone is too naturalistic, evil of an everyday sort remains too visible in its world, some of its petty culprits are still unscathed and at large; and its final celebration—of a married couple with a child returning to work—is too reserved and mundane. Still, its purgatorial comic resolution could have been written only by a poet capable of imagining this world's losing battles as reflecting paradisal light, and the eternal as disclosing something of its form in the letters of its own book that it writes.