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The Jilting Of Granny Weatherall, By Katherine Anne Porter

630 Words3 Pages

Austin Bangle
Professor Martin
ENG 102
February 4, 2023
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall A long-lived life will often come with many experiences, memories, and opinions. In the short story, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Katherine Anne Porter uses character, setting, and point of view to demonstrate the human desire for control over one’s life and death.
Character is one of the elements of fiction that Porter uses to illustrate how humans wish to have total control over their lives. The character of Granny Weatherall is the central figure in this story, and her experiences and thoughts reflect the common experiences of aging and death that are faced by many individuals. Porter brings this to the reader’s attention when she writes, “When she was sixty she had felt very old, finished, and went around making farewell trips to see her children and grandchildren, with a secret in her mind: This is the very last of your mother, children” (82)! Granny Weatherall is portrayed as a strong and independent woman who has lived a long life filled with both triumphs and failures. …show more content…

The setting of the story is a stark and simple bedroom which plays into the morbid and gloomy tone for the story. Porter describes this by writing, “Her eyes closed of themselves, it was like a dark curtain drawn around the bed. The pillow rose and floated under her, pleasant as a hammock in a light wind” (81). The setting is important in that it emphasizes the inevitability of death and the finality of life. The use of the bedroom as a setting also serves to stress the intimacy of the moment and the deep reflection that is taking place in Granny Weatherall's mind. By setting the scene on a deathbed, Porter constructs a reason for Granny Weatherall to reflect upon her life, as when people near death they think about all the things they could have done differently and what they enjoyed

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