Eudora Welty's Diction

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Welty ReWrite

As a child, many of us dream of the monsters lurking in the dark and fear the monsters that are merely figments of our imaginations. For Eudora Welty, that monster was in the form of Mrs. Calloway, the librarian of the town. Despite her fears, Welty would return to the library and face her monster on a daily basis to check out new reading material. Why would Welty willingly face a woman she feared daily? Because the value she put on reading was greater than any butterflies the “witch,” might give her. In her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty utilizes a very creative kind of diction while she writes to portray the intense thirst she has for reading.

To begin, Eudora Welty manipulates certain words in her text to exhibit the fear she and other children have for the librarian, Mrs. Calloway. She (Mrs. Calloway) would sit watching over the library with her “dragon eye,” as people came in to search for a new book (5). She was especially hard on the ladies, as she would, “[send] her strong …show more content…

She compares her passion for reading to a thirst or hunger, as she has a “devouring wish to read,” and her mother and herself share a “feeling of insatiability,” for reading (50, 55-56). This specific comparison conveys that her love of literature was more than just a hobby, as hunger is a feeling that absolutely needs to be tended to, as an insatiable thirst cannot be ignored. This specific rhetoric alludes to the exact intensity that Eudora Welty possesses when it comes to reading. To conclude, the specific diction that Eudora Welty employs in her life story emphasizes exactly how intense her passion for reading was, and still is. She faced a scary monster during her childhood, looked straight into the “dragon eye,” in order to get new literature to satisfy her insatiable thirst, and I believe that it makes her an admirable