Symbol and myth also have their uses in these stories. In a symbol, as Carlyle said, “there is concealment and yet revelation”; thus Miss Welty’s fiction naturally includes symbols, because they embody and enhance the mysteries she seeks out. Yet no detail of action, characterization, or name is distorted or denatured for the sake of a symbolic point; symbols appear unobtrusively because they are born into the material. In her work symbols function quietly, contributing to the form and the poetic density of the stories, deepening and enriching their surface meanings.

Miss Welty is as wary of symbol-hunting as she is of schematization. “The analyst,” she mildly protests, “should the story come under his eye, may miss this gentle shock and this pleasure too, for he’s picked up the story at once by its heels (as if it had swallowed a button), and is examining the writing as his own process in reverse, as though a story (or any system of feeling) could be accessible for being upside down.” Not that she is opposed to analysis; she seems only to be asking that the stories be met with the openness, the sense of urgency and adventure, with which they were created.

In short, reading a story by Eudora Welty is not like rowing across a lake, with your destination on the other side dimly or clearly perceived. It is more like climbing into a small, well-designed craft, cutting your moorings, and then abandoning yourself to a trip down a changing stream to an unknown point. You have no notion what will happen, but you soon discover that someone with great skill is steering and guiding the craft, determining the pace according to or perhaps despite the current. She seems to say, “Watch, be alert, trust me.” The stream rushes and changes; now you are hurtled through foaming rapids and bump against a rock; now you are brushed in the face by an overhanging bough; now you open onto a luminous pool, where the boat dallies and you gaze into quiet depths in which strange hidden life is drifting down under, and maybe, half dreaming, you see your own pensive face reflected on the surface; then you are off again and away. Everywhere there are fearful and pleasing events to shock and surprise; shy, elusive creatures to be detected behind the curtain of green; fascinating details to be seen up, down, and all about. When you reach your destination, that may seem, finally, the culmination of your trip; but sometimes you will want to look back and ask, “Where are we now, and what am I to think?” The helmsman, who has never been visible as a person, may never answer; and only then you may reflect that the significance of the journey was in the process, and that the parts of the process together make the experience a whole.