Alice Walker clearly focuses on Sarah in “A Sudden Trip Home in the Spring.” Although Sarah’s family members are important in helping her come to a healthy acceptance of her heritage and a confidence in her own artistic abilities, Walker keeps the grandmother, brother, and grandfather in minor roles, in part by not giving them names.

Twice in the story, Walker refers to a rat that Sarah must stare down. The first reference to the rat is when Sarah is alone in her bedroom with her father’s body lying in the casket. She calls to her brother that there is a rat under the casket, but her brother does not hear anything, leaving Sarah alone to deal with it. The rat here is both literal and symbolic. Sarah stares straight at it until it finally runs away, but her thoughts just before she notices the rat are also important. As her father lies dead, Sarah is also forced to face the unpleasant feelings she harbors about him and their somewhat estranged relationship. After her mother’s death, Sarah avoided her father as much as she could, spending much of her time in her own room. Thinking now about how Wright came to terms with a father who betrayed him, Sarah wonders whether unresolved feelings about her own father may keep her from achieving a healthy connection with her own roots and with herself.

As an adult, understanding the hardships her father endured working as a farmhand for white farmers, Sarah begins to see that what she felt was her father’s weakness may have actually been a strength. By this point in her life, Sarah herself has been placed in uncomfortable and humiliating circumstances by her white friends at college. Her father endured humiliations and hardships in order to keep the family together so that her generation could prosper; his and her mother’s difficult life brought forth a daughter who received a scholarship to attend a first-rate college. Sarah does not now see her father as a perfect man, but she begins to question her youthful assumptions about his weakness and what she saw as a lack of love for her mother. She recognizes now that he understood love much better than she did.

At the story’s end, Walker again writes of the rat. A collegemate, who does not know the reason for Sarah’s journey home, asks how her trip was. Sarah knows she is back in a world that has no comprehension of her own; she is back in an environment peopled by young women whose hair blows freely in the wind as they travel to the tennis courts and back. Sarah now is able to accept that world and yet hold tight to her own: “Stare the rat down, thought Sarah; and whether it disappears or not, I am a woman in the world. I have buried my father, and shall soon know how to make my grandpa up in stone.” Just as Sarah stares down the literal rat, she learns to accept both the strengths and the flaws of her father’s life and to tolerate the superficial view her college acquaintances have about her own life.