The P.O., or post office, where the character Sister works is symbolic. She works in a tiny post office in China Grove, in which her family is the main family. After deciding to leave home, Sister has redesigned the post office in the way she likes it, and she has placed the possessions she has taken from home, including her radio, ironing board, and sewing machine, into the post office.
Sister is a character who has disliked the intrusion into her life of elements from wider world, including her sister, Stella-Rondo, and the child who Stella-Rondo claims is adopted. Stella-Rondo left the town and has returned, much to Sister's dismay. It's ironic that Sister has taken up residence in the P.O., where she can pretend her family has vanished from the face of the earth. There, she can almost pretend that there is no outside world, even though the post...
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office is the place to which missives and messages from outside the town arrive. The idea of isolating oneself at the post office is ironic, as the post office is the conduit to the outside world, but the post office is also where Sister barricades herself away from the rest of the world. Her position in the P.O. represents her conflicted existence in which she wants to block out intrusions from the outside world but is still affected by the wider world.
You have to look at the story in its entirety to see the Biblical allusion to the story of the Prodigal Son. The narrator does not especially like her sister because she has just returned after leaving under suspicious circumstances. The sister is furious that she has to cook two chickens and try to feed five people plus one small child just because her "spoiled sister" has come home. Like the brothers in the Biblical story, the narrator is probably jealous because her sister left under disgraceful circumstances and is now being welcomed back to the family, with a meal which reminds us of the feast in the story of The Prodigal Son. The spoiled sister's "sin" seem to be quickly forgiven, just as the wandering son's sins were forgiven by the father in Biblical story.
What is a symbol in "Why I Live at the P.O." and its meaning?
A symbol in “Why I Live at the P.O. is Shirley-T, Stella-Rondo’s daughter. She is a symbol both of the life the narrator could have had and how her sister took it from her.
Much of the tension in the family gathering is caused by Shirley-T. Stella-Rondo has just left her husband, Mr. Whitaker. The narrator is jealous because Mr. Whitaker was “the only man ever dropped down in China Grove” and her sister got him “unfairly” and then came home “giving no rhyme nor reason whatsoever” for why she left and “no explanation for the presence” of Shirley-T.
Shirley-T is clearly too old to have been born during Stella-Rondo’s short marriage to Mr. Whitaker. She also looks like Papa-daddy, their grandfather. Yet Stella-Rondo insists she is adopted and the rest of the family is ready to accept the fiction. The narrator is the only one who does not, because she sees Shirley-T as a symbol of the life Stella-Rondo stole.
And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and attempt to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen.
The narrator blames Stella-Rondo for stealing her boyfriend, for lying about it, for having a child with him out of wedlock, and for leaving him. She refuses to accept what really happened, or to peacefully believe the lie either. Instead, she keeps pushing, causing her sister to push back and alienate other family members against her.
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