On The Poetic Art Of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles

Losing Battles(1970) is the representative long novel of American woman writer Eudora Welty. It is praised as "a novel with profound imagination and great popularity". Through the records of the prosperity and decay of the Vaughn family, the novel reflects the social reality that the Southern America of the 1930s is facing the transition from the agricultural society to the industrial and commerce one. With the help of the family members, it exposes the contradiction and perplexity of those farmers in the peculiar society. By analyzing the poetic art of the novel, this thesis intends to penetrate the fate of the special family living in the special historical period in southern rural areas of America and depicts the historical development. Losing Battles has peculiar characteristics in poetic art: First, the novel has double significances inside and outside. On the surface, it shows the complex struggles and the failure of the family. It involves many deep symbolic meanings, which show the inne and outer causes to the decay of the family and the definite tendency of the agricultural social development. The novel is telling us a tragic story. However, Welty puts some comedy elements in it so that she can display the serious theme through the humorous descriptions. Therefore, she shows her active attitude though she is disappointed with the Southern American rural areas and the people there.Second, the novel employs symbolic verbal pattern. In the aspect of the time verbal pattern, by reminiscing the family history, Welty compresses the long history of 100 years within one day. Abiding by "the time objectivity", she breaks the one-dimensional "objective time" and brings those characters and incidents of great different time on the same level. She pays much attention to the depictions of simultaneity scene, collecting many characters in some major scenes and designing the major scenes in the critical time of danger and failure. The different time with great compactness and contrasts is composed by numbers of time spots with historical significance. Therefore, it reaches the effect of simultaneity. In the aspect of space, Welty arranges most of the protagonist's actions in the vast wildness of the grassland in Banner by making use of the endless extent of outdoor space. In this way, shecollects the finite Banner with the infinite whole Southern America, even the Northern America and strengthens the historical certainty in the choice of characters.Third, the novel takes the strategy of statement through dialogues. This open strategy reflects the complicated social reality of Southern America in the special transitional time. In the form, Welty's use of dialogues presents readers a sense of close experience in the reality. She well controls the speed of the statement through the dialogues so that she can characterize the family members. She designs dialogues within the past, the present and the future by using the construction of simultaneity. She seems to tell us that people who lay behind will be thrown out through the failure of the dialogues between the old generations of the Vaughn, the Indians and the young generation. Furthermore, the writer exposes the complex and sharp contrast between the "new inhabitants" and the native inhabitants so that the necessity and importance of their dialogues is strengthened. In the great tension of the dialogues, the inner foundation of history development is shown.