Discussion Topic
The man cursing like a sailor's parrot and the man driving the cart in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."
Summary:
The man cursing like a sailor's parrot and the man driving the cart in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are not explicitly detailed figures within the story. Instead, these descriptions likely serve as brief, colorful characterizations that provide insight into the vivid memories and perceptions of Granny Weatherall as she reflects on her life and the people she encountered.
In "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," who are the man cursing like a sailor's parrot and the man driving the cart?
The man who "cursed like a sailor's parrot" is an unnamed character who was present long ago when Granny realized she had been jilted at her wedding. At that moment, Granny was so overwhelmed that she began to fall in a faint -
The whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away. His hand had caught her under the breast, she had not fallen, there was the freshly polished floor with the green rug on it, just as before.
The man who caught Granny, holding her steady until her world comes into focus again, "cursed like a sailor's parrot", and offered to kill the would-be bridegroom for Granny, but Granny begged him not to. The memory of this man, and the whole experience of being left at the altar, comes back to Granny in the...
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waning moments of her life.
The driver of the cart is a little more difficult to identify definitively. By the time Granny speaks of him, she is very near death, and her stream of consciousness is extremely jumbled. The idea of the cart is suggested to her by the sound of Cornelia's voice, which "stagger(s) and bump(s) like a cart in a bad road". From there, Granny envisions herself stepping up in the cart, and finds herself sitting beside a man who is driving. Granny does not look in his face; she knows who he is by his hands, and so she "look(s) instead down the road". By all indications, the man is death, who has come for Granny at last, taking her down the road to her final destination.
Who is the man described as "cursing like a sailor's parrot" in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?
The narrative of the story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" follows the stream of consciousness style. This means that the sequence of events will not follow a traditional order, and the point of view may be shared by a first and third person narrator, as it is the case in this story.
This being said, Katherine Anne Porter purposely allows the confusion of "who does what", "who is who", and "who says what". This is a way to somewhat commiserate with Granny Weatherall's own convoluted state of mind as she slowly, but surely, approaches death.
Therefore, out of two possibly good conclusions, one of the most likely candidates to have "cursed like a sailor's parrot" is John, who would then become Granny's future husband. It seems that John was a guest at the wedding the day that she was jilted. This is possible because John appears mentioned within the context of this particular memory and appears with close proximity in the narrative as part of another hallucination. A second good guess could be Granny's own father. After all, he is the person who is physically closest to her the moment that she is about to faint during her wedding day. Isn't the father the person who "gives" his daughter's hand in marriage? Also, who but a father could get angry enough to curse "like a sailor's parrot" and to wish for the death of the man who jilted his daughter?
He had cursed like a sailor’s parrot and said, “I’ll kill him for you.” Don’t lay a hand on him, for my sake leave something to God. “Now, Ellen, you must believe what I tell you….”
Those feverishly angry words have to come from someone who deeply cares for and loves Ellen Weatherall. Some have come to conclude that this is actually an exchange of words between Ellen's father and Father Connolly! Regardless of the guesses, the reality is that the reader is not meant to know who exactly is who in the story, precisely to preserve the atmosphere of confusion and foggy memories that moves the plot forward.