Eudora Welty Where Is The Voice Coming From

508 Words3 Pages
“Where Is The Voice Coming From” by Eudora Welty analyzes race, social stratification, and the fear of change through the eyes of the assassinator of an important NAACP member in Mississippi. The narrator describes the events before and after the assassination in great detail. “It’s a free country”, he begins quite ironically in his description of how his plan to kill Roland Summers first began to manifest itself, after seeing his face on TV one too many times. The aura of superiority that the narrator gives off is that of only someone who feels threatened, threatened by the encroaching presence of the want for equality. The dialect of the narrator suggests that he comes from an uneducated background, using phrases such as, “I says” and “I knowed” instead of correct grammar. In addition, Welty portrays the town in which the narrator lives as a small and poor. Due to the fact that he is seemingly poor and uneducated his position in society can be seen as just one step above the “negro”. This becomes the driving force in his decision to kill Roland in order for him to “be ahead” and “stay ahead” in the wake of the civil rights movement. After committing the murder, the narrator feels as if he is “on top of the world”,but he is soon to fall.…show more content…
Didn’t the skeeters bite you?” In a way it is quite comical. Although he claims that the act was done for his own “pure-D satisfaction”, the narrator still seems to be agitated by the fact that everyone, including his wife, seems to find a way to devalue and discredit his actions. He can not find any satisfaction in his deed because it is controlled by his want for attention and praise. He states, “They know who Roland Summers was without knowing who I am.” “You can’t win.” Indeed, you can’t win in a race where you are the only
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    Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909. After attending colleges in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and New York, she worked as a radio journalist and a publicity agent. Despite graduating from college in the midst of the Great Depression, she was able to find work for three years before deciding to make writing her full-time career. Welty published many short stories, books, and articles over the course of her career, even winning a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, before

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