Challenges In Eudora Welty's A Worn Path

A Worn Path During our life we face many challenges. We have the ability to either choose to face them or run from them. Some challenges can be more difficult than others, for we are alone to face them. We encounter many crossroads during our journeys where we have to choose which path we take in life. Sometimes we open a door just to see that on the other side there is another closed door. Even though sometimes we are defeated by challenges they make us stronger and give us the ability to keep going. In the short story A Worn Path written by Eudora Welty we see how challenges come in many ways, and yet we see an elderly woman called Phoenix Jackson overcame them, weather it is the natural world, society or her own mortality. The character …show more content…
Furthermore it was during the time period where a man was considered better than a woman. As she proceeds her journey, she reached a point of the road that was covered with live-oaks, that made the path ahead “as dark as a cave” (236). As she went through the path a “black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch” (236). The dog came to attack her, she was surprised and defended herself with her cane, which unwillingly made her fall in the ditch. After sometime “a white man finally came along and found her—a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain” (236). The man helped her get up. After the hunter helped Phoenix he asked where did she …show more content…
Attendant: A charity case, I suppose.
Because she is an African American, the attendant immediately assumed that she is poor, and therefore she is just another charity case. Throughout the short story we see many cases where Phoenix is discriminated not only because she a woman, but mainly because she is African American during a time of racial discrimination. We see her being constantly challenged throughout her journey by many kinds of challenges, both environmental and cultural. The main challenges she faces in her journey is her own mortality. Phoenix is characterized as a very old woman, and even she is aware that she doesn’t have that much time left. We constantly see she says that “the time [is] getting all gone” (234), and references to her bad eye sight such as “Old Phoenix would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her” (238). When she went to rest during her journey she seated but “she did not dare to close her eyes” (234), for she knew she might not wake up. Even though she didn’t close her eyes she