The Grave

8 Pages 1923 Words

The Grave
Katherine Anne Porter's short story is a third person narrative called The Grave. This piece is about the sweetness of adolescence and the corruption of innocence as a young girl uncovers the realities of life and death. As one reads the story they can get caught up in Katherine's web of descriptions. She uses a mixture of negative and positive words in her sentences to charm her readers into the understandings of life, death, and rebirth. How she uses symbolism to put life and death into perspective is both original and thought provoking. We begin reading her story in the history of the children's family past.
The beginning of the story sets the tone more so than it gives us a concrete setting. The tone is dark and disturbing as we are told that "The grandfather has been dead for more than thirty years," and the grandmother moved his body with her as she traveled. The only reference to setting in the first paragraph is in the telling of the grandmother's final move. It was in Kentucky that the grandmother at last settled into her first farm and was finally laid to rest. Also in the first paragraph, there is the moving of the family plot to the new public cemetery. Here we recognize that the grandmother failed to let the dead stay buried because of her own selfish desires. Death seems to be an inconvenience for the family, rather than something to be revered and respected.
The story is set with positive and negative descriptions about the family cemetery. Katherine describes the cemetery as having been a "pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass". At first the cemetery is "pleasant" which is positive. Then, it is negative with the descriptions of the "tangled rose bushes", and the "ragged cedar trees". Lastly, Katherine mixes positive and negative with the description of the "uncropped sweet-smelling...