About a decade ago, there arose a flurry of critical interest in Katherine Anne Porter's story "The Grave." This inquiry quickly subsided, apparently satisfied that "The Grave" had been adequately explained. In fact it had not, for an intense preoccupation with the predominating symbols of the short story had entailed a concomitant limiting of critical focus, so that the widest implications of the story were ignored…. Focusing upon the few most obtrusive symbols—the ring, the dove, the rabbits, and the grave—criticism has continued to neglect the story's paradigm of our most primal racial myth, that of the fall of man, which is itself the pattern of a primal experience in the life of each individual.
The opening paragraph of the story, outlining the history of the family and its cemetery, immediately draws our attention to the continuing cycles of life and death, and to the journeys of mankind both in life and potentially beyond it. The reference to grandparents, establishing the existence of children and grandchildren, evokes the cycle of generations. In close conjunction with this, the removal from place to place of the grandmother, as well as of the "oddments of relations," and the grandmother's repeated transportation of the grandfather's corpse … inevitably suggest the wandering movements of mankind on his larger journey through life toward death. The mention of eternity in the final sentence of the paragraph leaves latent the suggestion of a conclusion to the journey that carries beyond death.
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