All stories can be segmented into beginning, middle and end. A path traced by Eudora Welty follows this model. In the beginning, we meet Phoenix as she goes on her solitary journey encountering various obstacles in the natural world such as a steep hill, thorns that cling to her clothes, a log lying across a stream, and a maze. The mood of the story changes somewhat with the introduction of the white hunter who helps him out of the ditch but also points his gun at his face. We can identify the interactions with the hunter as indicating the middle of the story. Then, at the end of the story, Phoenix arrives in the town of Natchez and collects his medicine from the clinic. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Segmenting the story in this way allows us to see the shape of the entire story at a single glance. One aspect of the story that we can perceive in this way is that this phoenix's journey seems to take place in three stages and at each stage of its journey different types of challenges. At first, Phoenix faces the challenges of making his way through the natural world. Then the introduction of the hunter presents him with the challenge of negotiating in a world of other people. Then in the city, she finds herself confronted with the challenges of society. In this way we can observe the levels of obstacles that Welty represents in the story and we see how the physical obstacles from the beginning of the story transform into more complex obstacles such as the racism, social stigma and poverty described at the end. of history. The structure in a worn path we never see the phoenix at rest, we never see it at home, it is always constantly in motion. Its entire history can be considered as an extended middle without beginning or end. She is always traveling, always suspended in the air. Reading the story this way emphasizes the open-ended quality of the story. The end of the story isn't the end for Phoenix because she still has to do the whole trip in reverse for the return trip. This trip itself is furthermore just one of many such trips that Phoenix has taken in the past and will continue to make in the future. When we consider this aspect of history, we can think of it as a story about time itself. The way we all live in the flow of an extended environment. Of course, the name phoenix alludes to the mythical bird that lives through cycles of destruction and rebirth. The very first sentence sets the story in December, the end of one year and the beginning of the next. In the morning, when the weather becomes night, it will return today. Phoenix herself is described as a grandfather clock due to the way she walks with a limp between a heavy step and a light step. In this context, the phoenix itself seems to participate in the natural cycles of day and night. The phases of the moon and it evolves as if it were itself a force of nature bound in a relentless orbit. Phoenix also appears as a human. We said that a flat character is one that lacks complex motivations and that Phoenix could be considered a flat character because all she seems to want throughout the story is to get medicine for her grandson, but as we read the story more closely, his psychology seems to be more complex. “She received the nickel, then took the other nickel out of her pocket and put it next to the new one. She looked intently at her palm, head to one side,” one of the clues that the phoenix is ​​not a stereotypical grandmother figure.It's his clever steps that are worth a nickel from the hunter. When she sees the coin fall from the hunter's pocket, she cleverly pits two dogs against each other to distract the hunter so she can carefully put the nickel in her own pocket without being observed. We know that stealing is wrong and we know that Phoenix is ​​supposed to be the protagonist, so the reader must invent a way to reconcile this apparent contradiction. Is it okay for Phoenix to steal the hunter because he's a fanatic and deserves to be exploited? Or does Phoenix's extreme poverty provide an excuse for his behavior? Or should we think of the phoenix as combining both noble and ignoble qualities? That would be another way of saying that we're supposed to think of her as human, as a round character. Indeed, at the very end of the story, she recounts this nickel again and compares it to another nickel she received from the clinic attendant. The two nickels, the one she stole and the one she received through relatively honest means, seem to represent two facets of her character, recalling the description of the phoenix in the first paragraph as a balance between heaviness and lightness . Another conflict that helps make Phoenix a rounded character is this as she persists in her commitment to getting the medicine for her grandson. At several points in the story, she seems tempted to abandon the journey altogether and sink into a restful death. At one point, sitting down to rest, she has a dream vision of a little boy who brings her a piece of cake which she is happy to accept. This spectral vision seems to represent a fantasy of giving in to the temptation to stop the journey. Even more visible when a black dog throws her into a ditch, she lies down in the springy weeds and, unable to extricate herself, seems resigned to remaining in this shallow grave indefinitely. It's pure luck that the hunter comes to help him, but the thought remains that Phoenix is ​​so old and tired that the prospect of dying during his journey isn't entirely unpleasant. Indeed, the frequency with which dream images intrude into Phoenix's reality suggests that she exists in a sort of boundary between consciousness and sleep, between life and death, providing another frame of reference for that balance between heaviness and lightness, Welty said, that she described in her initial description of her protagonist. The context of the history of the American Deep South at some point in the first half of the 20th century obviously plays an important role in the narrative. The lack of respect shown toward Phoenix by the hunter and by the clinic's attendance is clearly intended to be understood in the context of the racial tensions of the Jim Crow era. While we can consider Phoenix Jackson as a kind of eternal, timeless pilgrim on a path between life and death. He is also a special person with a special relationship to American history. We learned at the end of the story that Phoenix never went to school because she was too old for "the surrender", meaning that when the South surrendered at the end of the civil war and that freed slaves were offered the opportunity to educate themselves. Phoenix was already past school age. This revelation that Phoenix spent the first two decades of his life as a slave has a chilling residency compared to his statement in paragraph five "it feels like we have chains around my feet, it's time I comes this far" literally, Phoenix has difficulty climbing the hill and the difficulty of moving forward recalls the weight of the leg irons but the discovery that Phoenix was born a slave makes this.