the wide net summary

the wide net summary

My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university. Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201055. Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, The Weavers Grave, by the Irish writer Seumas OKelly. I learned that several young ancestors had been killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war from disease. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. Forkner has also published three books on John James Audubon: Journals and Selected Writings in the Penguin Nature Classics series, with an introduction and editorial commentary; and two in Europe: the two-volume Journaux et Rcits (Atalante and the City of Nantes), a comprehensive collection of Audubons writings in French, newly translated, with a full biographical introduction and editorial commentary, and the John James Audubon Portfolio (Edition de la Main Fleurie) which includes an introduction, a selection of Audubons letters, and forty-eight reproductions of Audubons original watercolors printed on hand-made paper designed to replicate the paper used in the early nineteenth century. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. Print. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. 183). Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charma wind touched each man on the forehead (Welty, Collected Stories 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. 44Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. Packet switching was thought of as a better and faster method to transfer data than the hardware solution to the problem, i.e., the circuitry. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightnin drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappys cheek, stayed till he died (Welty, Collected Stories 183). As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge (Welty. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. There is no great central Southern myth in The Wide Net. But I must have half-remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one mans solitary predicament. Other people join in too. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. As the men and boys work together to drag the river, they turn up a bunch of stuff: some fish, a great number of shoes, eels, alligators, and so on. The packet switching technology was essential to the development of . There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. Knowing Eudora Weltys love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate. As Mr Duval finished, and stood up to leave, he reached out to me and shook my hand: Your granddaddy was the only white man I ever loved.. William Wallace knows now that Hazel holds the secret mystery that will continue to make him more of his own man, and he is willing to follow her lead as long as it takes: He climbed to his feet too and stood beside her trying to look where she looked. , one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. LCRI Net-Zero 2050: U.S. Economy-Wide Deep Decarbonization Scenario Analysis # Executive Summary As part of the Low-Carbon Resources Initiative open in new window (LCRI), EPRI and GTI Energy led an integrated energy system scenario modeling exercise to evaluate alternative technology strategies for achieving economy-wide net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2) in the United States by 2050. Twain, Mark. William goes to get his friend, Virgil, with whom he'd spent the night carousing, and the pair of them round up some neighborhood men to drag the river. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of The Wide Net to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfathers house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. 23Think of another name in The Wide Net, Edna Earle. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River (Welty, Collected Stories 176). Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. The roses needed a lot of water. The Wide Net (185) :Eudora Welty Breaking up of the party Discussed by Jenna Campbell William Wallace Jameson Hazel In old 1300s Great war hero of Scotland Williams Wife 3 mths Pregnate Virgil in the wars for Scottish Independence Conflicted main character, Best friend of William almost like his voice of reason Also In Dante's Inferno In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. It syncs contacts, emails, and events from email tools to Salesforce. 10The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. The story works on several levels and gives the viewer no clue as to whether it should be taken seriously at all. Furthermore, wide networks can successfully learn with a . Then he announced Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. They catch a baby alligator and the Malone brothers insist that they want to keep it. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. In The Wide Net there are too many myths to make a whole. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. Of course the well-trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the, . But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. One was the Florida artist A.E. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into The Wide Net does take some special pleading. William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. Her most acclaimed work is the novel The Optimist's Daughter, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, as well as the short stories "Life at the P.O." and "A Worn Path.". He no longer fears Hazels mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. [Anthony Herrera; Rachel McPherson; Marcus Viscidi; Kyra Sedgwick; Barry Tubb; Tim Ransom; M Josef Sommer; Glen Roven; Eudora Welty;] -- Set in rural Mississippi, the story focuses on the turbulent relationship of a young married couple, William Wallace and his wife Hazel, in the American South in 1933. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. 17She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. Print. 37Beanie deserves his own story. Foots waited until they were all inside. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. 42Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. 33In this respect, my grandfather was a rare exception. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined . Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. We bought ice cream at the same shop even though there were white and colored water fountains outside on opposite sides of the shop. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? Does anybody really believe there is a body in the creek or are they just having great time being outdoors together in the precious last waning days of early fall. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. The father of the white boys is rumored to have drowned in the Pearl River, and the father of the black boys had been struck by lightning and, as Robbie cries out during a storm, was dead three days, dead as that-there axe (Welty. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. 8The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 67|Autumn 2016, mis en ligne le 01 dcembre 2018, consult le 02 mars 2023. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: Murdered. These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. The wide net. She continues several pages later: It is our inward journey that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. She could have easily searched out one of the old Backus crowd willing to share the memory of Beanies role in the funeral and the missing headstone. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Wide-Net-and-Other-Stories. He was on a mission. Backus, locally known as Beanie. The Aeneid. Robert Fitzgerald. Life on the Mississippi. But they remain children, and act their age. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten-volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy talesGrimm, Andersen, the English, the French, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrims Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. 15The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. Beginning as a folktale of the barely possible innocence of a perennial boy with a cow-lick, at a loss and turning in circles, the story right in the middle changes skin, and the boy and the narrative miraculously transform themselves into a one-of-a-kind human triumph. . As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is beginning to dawn on him. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace and Company 1943 We offered this copy of the first edition in our Catalog 119. reference info. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. It was a far better show than the movie. He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. 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