[Katherine Anne Porter's] sense of what makes for an ending is similar to that found in Aristotle's definition of Greek tragedy; and that was an analogy that she was proudly conscious of, as she remarked. "Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation—what the Greeks would call catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination—through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true. Oh, not in any pawky individual idea of morality or some parochial idea of right and wrong. Sometimes the end is very tragic, because it needs to be."

In terms of the act of writing, this can be put differently and very simply: the story must tell you, "I know where I'm going." And that is where Mr. Helton comes in. "He just clumped down his big square dusty shoes one after the other steadily, like a man following a plow, as if he knew the place well and knew where he was going and what he would find there." That's how Mr. Helton walks into the story "Noon Wine," and into Mr. Thompson's life. The story ends with Mr. Thompson walking out of his own life. As he says at the end of the story, "I still think I done the only thing there was to do" …; and there is no doubt that unless this statement of his made some kind of sense to us Miss Porter would feel that the story had failed. (pp. 230-31)

"Noon Wine," then, is a story which shows us where a man is going and what he finds when he gets there. But this sense of a direction is not something that can be grasped simply: what the story shows is the complex nature of "direction" in human life. To reverse Miss Porter's dictum, if the story creates a sense of order it does so successfully only insofar as it recognizes and respects life's confusion. The direction of a man's life is not the same as the direction a man takes when following a plow, and any writer who mistakes the one direction for the other is liable to clump down his big square dusty shoes one after the other all over his "story." When, after reading the story, we re-read that opening passage which describes the arrival of Mr. Helton, we must not only be struck by the implications of this description, now revealed by our sense of the ending, but must also believe anew in the particularity and incidental quality of the metaphor. The "as if" must genuinely lead us to the way the man walks as well as to the strange sympathies and antipathies in the story that follows.

This palpable sense of a world is vitally important to the story's meaning. What happens is intelligible only in terms of the place where it happens. It is a matter not only of direction (which is one metaphor) but also of texture (a different metaphor). The murder Mr. Thompson commits is as much a matter of the heat as anything else. "Meantime the August heat was almost unbearable, the air so thick you could poke a hole in it. The dust was inches thick on everything."… The word "thick" is just right: it comes to mean more and more from then on in the story. It is the word that describes Mr. Thompson's voice after he has struck Mr. Hatch down…. "Thick" becomes resonant, a word that explores all the bafflement and inarticulateness of the man, his dim sense of a world growing thick around him, until it becomes unbearable…. And yet that is the world which he had always felt as solidly familiar. (pp. 231-32)

The word "thick," in the phrase "thick hands," itself expresses and explains Mr. Thompson's helplessness. The same word used in the description of his Sunday suit makes us feel the solid respectability of the cloth, a respectability so important to the farmer and so stifling a part of his tragedy. Once the language of the story becomes familiar (and this need not involve noticing the repeated use of a word, of course), there seems a particular aptness and poignancy in Mr. Thompson's writing his lonely suicide note with "a stub pencil" and on "a thin pad of scratch paper" taken "from the shelf where the boys kept their schoolbooks."… It is then that he fully realizes and accepts his isolation. (p. 232)

What dominates and guides [Mrs. Thompson's] understanding of what happened is her fear and suspicion of male violence and physicality. And yet what the story, through the shape of its action and the shape of its language, makes clear, is that Mrs. Thompson's bitterness here, her frustration, is of the same order as the bitter indignation and frustration that leads her husband to kill Mr. Hatch. This is quietly brought out …: "Her thoughts stopped with a little soundless explosion, cleared and began again."… It is typical of Mrs. Thompson that her "explosions," compared to those of her husband, should be "little" and "soundless." One of the most distressing things about her husband is that he is big and loud. Mrs. Thompson is more liable to implode than explode…. (p. 234)

The measure of the difference between what the same scene means to Mr. Thompson and to Mrs. Thompson is beautifully and quietly brought out by the language of the two following passages. The first describes the slowly mounting anger that leads to Mr. Thompson's killing Mr. Hatch. "Mr. Thompson sat silent and chewed steadily and stared at a spot on the ground about six feet away and felt a slow muffled resentment climbing from somewhere deep down in him, climbing and spreading all through him."… Though he cannot find what other people would consider proper reasons for this, his sense of how things are is stronger than his sense of how they would look to other people; and in persisting to act according to his feelings he relegates everyone else to the situation of outsiders, lookers-on. When Mrs. Thompson appears, her reaction is also very much in character. "Mrs. Thompson sat down slowly against the side of the house and began to slide forward on her face; she felt as if she were drowning, she couldn't rise to the top somehow."… (pp. 235-36)

It is important that both of these reactions should be in character. Each does what he or she does upon coming to the end of thought, and something else takes over to resolve the matter. "Thought" is, in fact, an important word in the story, and part of the meaning of the story seems to move through its recurrence. It is not by any means the only word of such importance in "Noon Wine"; and of necessity these words pursue no solitary course through the narrative. They are centers of gravity, attracting and concentrating meaning. Or, to put it another way, they quietly intensify the language of the world of the story. Their relationships to each other become vital to the way they mean anything—as "thick" can be said to lead in the direction of the language of the end of the story.

The word "think" attains a similar life of its own: "Mr. Thompson couldn't think how to describe how it was with Mr. Helton…. It was a terrible position. He couldn't think of any way out."… This use of "think" is more than accidental. The problem of not being able to think is the heart of the tragedy, not least because thinking is a means of finding a way out through words. It is a process of understanding, a way of discovering, a form of knowing—and "knowing" is a word significantly related to "thinking" in this story. It is not only of his children that Mr. Thompson can feel, in the earlier part of the story, that he has succeeded in raising them "without knowing how he had done it."… [Mrs. Thompson says:] "I always say, the first thing you think is the best thing you can say."… [This] provides a good account of the embarrassment and real difficulty of sustained thinking for such people as these. Their minds work painfully slowly, bemused at the least disturbance of the limited vocabulary of their understanding. But because of this they come to stand for the real difficulties of thought and understanding…. Katherine Anne Porter is here able to bring [the complications of meaning and the halo that surrounds events] out through the fumbling ordinary speech of her characters. There is a distinct difference between bungling and fumbling. Mr. Thompson starts out as a potentially comic figure—a bungler: and this contributes all the more to the tragic figure he becomes, fumbling in his memory, trying to get things straight. And it is this that gives point and dignity to his death—to his fumbled suicide, all the more deliberate and meaningful because it is such a clumsy thing to do.

The word "think" leads, then, to some such understanding of the story as has been here suggested. But to say that an important part of the story's meaning seems to be expressed and explored through the use of a simple word is not, obviously, to say that every use of that word in the story is significant. Still, there are casual, unimportant uses of the word that become charged with at least a measure of irony when some of its meanings elsewhere are recalled…. The point need not be labored. All that is worth noting is [that a phrase like] "the more I got to thinking about it" becomes resonant with additional, ironic, bitter meanings, gathered from the rest of the story and the powerful history of the phrase. The intensity of "Noon Wine," the peculiar texture of its meaning, is created in this way. (pp. 236-37)

Mr. Thompson's suicide is committed as deliberately, as thoughtfully as he writes his final letter. Here he not only stops to think but thinks and then stops; here he takes his stand; and here, on the last page, many of the words that have taken on great strength of meaning throughout the story lend their strength and depth to this last scene. (p. 238)

[There] is dignity of a high order in Mr. Thompson's death. The key words in these final passages are "cautiously" and "carefully."… The details are right; Mr. Thompson's arrangements are careful and detailed. He does not rush on death, he approaches it deliberately, walking "to the farthest end of his fields" and in the direction to which the whole story may now be seen to point. He does not drown thought in the roar of the gun. Though his suicide is clumsy, fumbled, movingly awkward, it is literally an achievement of the mind, an achievement of thought…. The story ends here, at the "logical" end of the plot: there is no other way out. The words Mr. Thompson speaks towards the end are words he "has to" speak. Though they come out of his deepest experiences, they are the simplest of words. The words with which he takes leave of his wife are charged with the whole meaning of his tragedy. He leaves her in the hands of the "boys," saying that he is just going out to fetch the doctor…. Though Mr. Thompson is not one to speak pregnant sentences, the sentence, "You'll know how to look after her," is nevertheless pregnant with meaning. It is full of his resignation—in all senses of the word: his sense of finally having to give up, to act out the inevitable, and the identification of this with "resigning" his wife, committing her to the care of those who know how to look after her. He no longer knows. And there is tragic irony here. During all his married life he has been devoted to her; a great part of the sense of his life has come from his care for Mrs. Thompson's delicate health. Moreover, this care and protection of his wife has sustained his sense of his own manliness, a manliness that has now been challengingly, almost threateningly, assumed by his sons. (pp. 239-40)

The fresh start he makes is very different from anything he had imagined only a short time previously. But it comes from the final complete understanding he has of how and where he stands. Everybody believes him a murderer: he believes that he is not….

[He and his wife] are isolated by what they "don't know" as much as by what they know, and as such they become two witnesses on our behalf to the terrible mystery of life. The infinite chaos of their situation springs in part from their lack of imagination but much more from the unimaginable chaos of life…. What Mr. Thompson knows at the end of "Noon Wine" is the depth of his unfathomable world.

Something of this has been in the story from the first. Mr. Thompson has been prone to bafflement all along…. (p. 241)

"A stranger in a strange land": that perfectly sums up Mr. Thompson's situation at the end of "Noon Wine." Is it "God's world" … or is it "a strange land"? Are the phrases incompatible? Mr. Thompson, like Mr. Helton, talks wrong: "his words wandering up and down."… His accent is all wrong, he puts the emphasis in the wrong place, and his neighbors, even the Thompson family, can't understand him…. [The harmonicas are Mr. Helton's] speech, his language; they are what enable him to express himself, to understand himself, to survive. They bring order into his world. And this is what—metaphorically, not literally—the song Helton plays over and over to himself means. It stands for everything that people, in this story and out of it, cannot "put into words, hardly into thoughts."… Mrs. Thompson assumes that what the song means is in the words; and several critics have followed her, believing that the title of the story needs to be understood in terms of the words of the song. But this can be only partly true. Mr. Thompson learns through bitter experience what the song "means." At the end he knows that it means one man's being isolated with his understanding—the fateful privacy of meaning. (p. 244)

Katherine Anne Porter spoke of the shape of a story, the way it is brought to "a logical and human end." "Human" here is not an addition to the logic but the character of the logic: it is the logic of human experience. And that is what this essay has been concerned with exploring. It has tried to show the "direction" of "Noon Wine," which is of course "where it is going." "Direction" can be a misleading word—it is too linear in its implications; "shape" might be better, it can at least imply body, which allows for what here has been called the texture of the story. What this reading has tried to suggest is that feeling this is a matter of realizing how a certain language is characteristic of the story: the "logic" of "Noon Wine" is the same as its character.

What is remarkable is that the "plot" thickens to the extent that a reader masters the story in its ordinariness. A story creates a sense of order successfully only insofar as it recognizes and respects life's confusion. The order of "Noon Wine" is gradually sensed in the fine confusion of people's talk. It cannot be extracted: it must be left where it is. There is a depth and dignity of reticence to the story, and all the garrulity of explanation should finally rest on this.

The artist's task is to thicken language, to make it compact of meaning. There are ways and ways of doing this, since art knows no musts but only an infinite may. Katherine Anne Porter's way is that of a rich plainness. (p. 245)

[The] more one reads, re-reads, the more "the light thickens." And such thickening of the light in "Noon Wine" seems to be of the nature of that kind of intensity that is tragedy…. Her story is about ordinary people, all the more ordinary in being "strangers in a strange land." They are unaware that in their lives they act out the ceremony of fate. We, through them, are made aware of the fearful symmetry of a life. (p. 246)