Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, "I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike; there are broad classifications and deep similarities, but I am interested in the thumbprint." No work could better illustrate her interest than "Noon Wine," whose four main characters, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, Mr. Helton, and Mr. Hatch, are so clearly individuated through their actions, speech, and physical appearance that it is difficult to imagine how they could be more unlike each other. And yet their "broad classifications and deep similarities," attributable to their common parentage in the unifying and controlling imagination of their author, tell us more about the world which entraps them than their unique thumbprints. Miss Porter's own discussion of "Noon Wine" … proves the point: "Every one in this story contributes, one way or another directly, or indirectly, to murder, or death by violence," yet "every one concerned, yes, even Mr. Hatch, is trying to do right." Her generalizations clearly reveal the tragic dimensions of the story. (pp. 83-4)

First, we note that every character finds that his efforts to do right are thwarted by those in whom he has placed his trust…. This theme of undependability is found in Miss Porter's other works; for example, Miranda in "Old Mortality" loses faith in her parents and their contemporaries: "I will make my own mistakes, not yours; I cannot depend upon you beyond a certain point, why depend at all?"

It is true that characters in "Noon Wine" fail each other's trust, but it is also true that oftentimes they unreasonably place their trust where it is likely to fail. Mr. Hatch should not expect Mr. Thompson to help him capture Mr. Helton. And Mr. Thompson should not expect his wife to do all the chores which he considers unmanly. Although he attempts to reconcile himself to the reality of her frail health, he still feels that somehow he has been betrayed and so subconsciously blames her for the run-down condition of the farm when he should blame his own laziness. The shifting of blame from themselves to others is characteristic of the Thompsons and implicit in their discovery that others are not to be trusted.

This distrust and blame-shifting suggest that each character is ignorant of or unable to face his own weaknesses. Instead, he falsely bolsters his own self-esteem by detecting weaknesses in others. Thus his self-ignorance, compounded by his ignorance of others, never permits him to establish a firm foundation for mutual trust and understanding. (pp. 84-5)

The characters of "Noon Wine" do not so much share similarities as suffer from them. Ironically, their deepest similarity is their inability to recognize what makes them similar; if they could, they would not be what they are: well-meaning people who are victims of themselves, each other, and of a mysterious set of circumstances with which they are unable to cope.

It would be absurd to think that Miss Porter has mechanically forced her characters to illustrate a preconceived thesis; her own discussion of the story's sources and the inevitable way her plot unravels are proof against such a notion, if proof were needed. Nevertheless, when we view the story from the perspective of the author's tragic vision, we come to realize how thoroughly each character reflects it in their deep similarities to each other. Their invincible ignorance of themselves and of each other is the principal ingredient of that vision. (p. 85)

Appearing out of nowhere like the archetypal mysterious stranger, Helton and Hatch enter through the gate of Mr. Thompson's farm as if they were entering his innermost being. Although they are independent characters in their own right, whose actions precipitate their own deaths as well as Mr. Thompson's, they function as doubles of Mr. Thompson, symbolically representing hidden aspects of his personality which he does not comprehend. (pp. 85-6)

Because he operates only on the level of appearances, Mr. Thompson cannot comprehend the connection between his self image and his misfortune nor can he comprehend that his good fortune is his misfortune with a delayed reaction of nine years. Above all, he cannot even sense the psychological affinities between his character and that of the man who lives at the center of his misfortune. (p. 86)

Helton is a stranger, not just to Texas, but the world against which he holds a grudge and with which he refuses to communicate. His unhappy state almost literally resembles Miranda's in "Pale Horse Pale Rider": "Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there and yet is helpless to leave it at his will." The partial cause of Miranda's despair is her lost dream of a happy Edenic state, which makes the world seem so bitterly drab and empty by contrast. We can only conjecture that Helton has suffered the loss of a similar dream, symbolized by his song about drinking up all the wine before noon…. Helton's zombie-like existence on the farm is continually stressed. He moves about mechanically and with unseeing eyes. He is like a "disembodied spirit," whose voice comes "as from the tomb." It is only a matter of time before his actual death will end his symbolic life-in-death. (pp. 86-7)

Only when Mr. Thompson's nine years of prosperity end in the deaths of Helton and Hatch do we realize that the "Noon Wine" song equally applies to him. At that point, Thompson's life more clearly follows the pattern of Helton's…. After Hatch's death, Thompson, unlike Helton, tries to communicate with others, but the results are the same since Thompson's neighbors do not understand him. (p. 87)

"Noon Wine" follows the pattern of other stories of the double in which the double's appearance does not begin a process, but symbolizes a psychic struggle already in process. (p. 88)

[To] understand Hatch's role as Thompson's double, we must see how all three men interrelate by comparing Thompson's interviews with Helton and Hatch, for the second interviewing a horrible parody of the first, with roles ironically reversed. In the first scene Mr. Thompson, displaying all the forced amiability of his public self confronts his secret, alienated, violent self; in the second scene Thompson confronts a parody of his public self of the first scene. (pp. 89-90)

Thompson's encounter with Hatch marks the point at which opposing elements of his character, represented by his two doubles, have grown so large that they can no longer be contained within him. Helton has seemingly fulfilled Thompson's desire to build a reputation in the eyes of the community as a successful, industrious, law-abiding, socially amiable family man. But ultimately Helton represents the price Thompson must pay for his prosperity because the industry that made it possible also includes an antisocial, foreign insularity, subversive to the community and the family, which threatens to break out in violence whenever it is threatened. Thus, as Helton "takes hold" on the farm, he creates Thompson's parasitic prosperity while at the same time undermining it. Hatch's appearance forces Thompson to confront a monstrously magnified image of his public self. Hatch is a parody of Thompson's stance as American-born solid citizen, upholding all the proclaimed standards of law and order…. [In] killing Hatch, he has most effectively killed "his dignity and his reputation that he cared about." His actual suicide is almost anticlimactic. (pp. 90-1)