The Optimists Daughter: A Look at Death and Dying Essays -- Optimist

The Optimists Daughter A Look at end and Dying Fay struck out with her hands, hitting at Major lead and Mr. Pitts and Sis, fighting with her mother, too, for a moment. She showed her claws at Laurel, and broke from the preachers last-minute arms and threw herself in front across the coffin on to the pillow, driving her lips without aim against the face low hers. She was dragged back into the library, screaming, by Miss Tennyson Bullock, out of sight behind the cover of greenery. Judge McKelvas smoking chair lay behind them, overturned (86). This is a short excerpt from The Optimists Daughter (1972) by the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Eudora Welty. The report card is centered around Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who left field her home in the South to live in Chicago. While in Chicago she meets Philip Hand, and they are married. Philip, however, goes to war and never returns. Laurel is now venturing to bare-assed Orleans to be with her dying father. After his deva station Laurel and her exceptionable stepmother, Fay, travel back to Laurels home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi. Once in Mount Salus, Laurel is greeted with many friends and acquaintances. The whole town has already watchful for Laurel and the remains of her father. The day of the funeral the whole town stops to comprise their respects the school ,the bank, the post office, and the court house all close. The funeral is perfect, still Laurel struggles with letting her father go. Laurels bridesmaids also struggle the bridesmaids are Laurels nighest friends and range from young to elderly women. After the funeral is over Fay returns with her family to Texas for a a couple of(prenominal) days while Laurel finishes saying goodbye to her old house. Fay is in truth bitter t... ...eels about her. Fay, on the other hand, would be lost without her Texan accent. The Optimists Daughter opens the mind of the reader to let him see the many reactions of friends and relatives to death and dying. As Fay strikes out during the funeral it is easy to recognize that culture also plays into peoples reactions. When Fay kisses her maintain goodbye, while he was in the coffin, it is because that is what her mother would have done. It can be very hard to deal with the death of a loved one, merely sometimes it is even harder to deal with how others are reacting. The novel explains that, Memory lived non in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the nervus that can empty but fill again, in the patterns of restored dreams(179). Works CitedWelty, Eudora. The Optimists Daughter. The vintage Book 1990 Edition. New York.