The Welcome Table

The Welcome Table

Karen Fay

ENG125: Introduction to Literature

Instructor Benjamin Daw

July 29, 2013

The Welcome Table

Literature, too many of us varies from person to person. Some might see it as a journey that we, as readers, take. Reading lets us go into the imaginary world. Readers can experience real life scenarios through reading literature. Readers can also learn different ways to look at things that we often see in our everyday life. Reading brings you into a whole new world and a different way to look at every day in a new perspective. This paper is written so that you can identify what this piece of literature is about and how the author draws the reader into the characters world. This approach gives you a better understanding of why it was written and the meaning behind it.

What drew my attention to this story was the way the author, Alice Walker, described the old woman. You knew right away that she was old and worn down. I could picture her in my mind with her hair in her scarf all dirty and stained. I’m sure it was once a beautiful scarf. When the narrator describes her clothes and the way she looked, she does so very precisely as not to leave any details out,

“The old woman stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes: high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as head rag stained with grease from many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering. There was a dazed and sleepy look in her aged blue-brown eyes. But for those who searched hastily for “reasons” in that old face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read.”(As cited in Clugston, 2010, section 3.1, par.1)

The woman in this story showed that she isn’t threatened by the wealthy and will do as she pleases. She is a woman who is a sight to look at and people talk about. She doesn’t belong there. But, still she walks down the road...