The Little Store

While reading Eudora Welty’s “The Little Store” I noticed she has an interesting control over the use of perspective compared to most objective writers. It’s quite a refreshing change, but it made things a little harder to read at times. I felt as though she was writing so that I may experience a childhood memory in close proximity to hers.

The opening of the essay sets the stage in a setting very familiar to her, her home, while relating the experience to her family. However, none of this seems to play into the rest of the essay, as it is about the store down the road, and the experiences she has had because of it. I believe she enters this way so that she can take a mundane tale about buying a few items at the local market, and turn it into something extraordinary, encapsulating the experiences each reader has had (for example, the fear of narrow, dark places e.g. the storm sewer) as a child while still keeping it all personal to her.

The story can connect with readers on many levels, but it is still unquestionably a story about her and her experiences and relationships. Everyone has experienced noticing a familiar person in an unfamiliar setting, although it’s a unique experience for every individual. In her case it is tied directly to the little store. She writes, “I ran to the store to discover…a grown person” and goes on to state, “It was the Monkey Man, together with his monkey…In my whole life so far, I must have laid eyes on the Monkey Man no more than five or six times.”

Welty seems to consider the store itself as something symbolizing her youth, that the Little Store was inexplicably tied by some thread to most, if not all, of the enjoyment she experienced during her time living near it. The road she played games on as a child is not just a road, but "the road that leads to the store" which ties her recreation time, directly to the time she was at the store. “I knew even the sidewalk to it as well as I knew my own skin. I'd skipped my jumping-rope up and down it, hopped its length through mazes of hopscotch, played jacks…” exemplifies how Welty describes everything in her memories in relation to the store.

This is a rare form of writing in which the centerpiece is not the narrator or the person that the story refers to most, but an object, idea, or place that ties a multitude of emotional threads together. I think this was Welty’s goal, as the store relates to happy moments, sad moment, wondrous moments, and confused moments. She uses her perspective as a child flawlessly to engage the reader using his or her own childhood experiences.