Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton is the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, Piedmont-Marton examines the narrative structure and themes of the story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall."

In her essay "The Eye of the Story," fellow southern writer and critic Eudora Welty observes that "most good stories are about the interior of our lives, but Katherine Anne Porter's stories take place there; they surface only at her choosing." "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is certainly one of these interior stories, as Porter uses Ellen Weatherall's fragile state of mind as a narrative device to connect past and present and the living and the dead.

While "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is told by a third person narrator, readers are drawn into the mind of Ellen Weatherall and come to see the events of the story from her...