In the following essay, Peter Schmidt employs character analyses for detailed insight into Welty's story.
One way to think of the Rondo family in "Why I Live at the P.O." is as an exceptionally noisy family of paper cutouts. Certainly the characters are as delightfully two-dimensional, and as farcically posed, as the cutouts described in "Women!!" but the story is also a comedy about fashion, gender differences, and power.
"Why I Live at the P.O." is set in China Grove, Mississippi, and features Sister as the narrator, Stella-Rondo (her younger sister), Papa-Daddy (Sister's grandfather), Mama (Sister's mother), Uncle Rondo, Stella-Rondo's two-year-old daughter Shirley- T., and (briefly) a dying woman named Old Jep Patterson. In the beginning of Sister's monologue, most readers tend to share Sister's view of the absurdity of her family members. Sister's main tactic.....
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