The Little Store

Eudora Welty structures her story, “The Little Store” by first giving a brief description of her town and her mother. Explaining her mother’s use of the nearby Grocer’s delivery service forms a good transition into the main part of her story, which is the young girl’s journey to “The Little Store”. When Welty comments, “she never set foot inside a grocery store” (Welty, 155) and then proceeds to detail the mother’s use of grocery delivery for her regular needs, she is providing a good transition into why the these trips to “The Little Store” are necessary.

Welty next begins to detail how well the little girl knows the sidewalk leading to “The Little Store” by stating, “I knew even the sidewalk to it as well as I knew my own skin” (Welty, 155). She reinforced this point by explaining the multitude of games that the young girl played. She commented on jumping rope, hopscotch, jacks, roller-skating, bike riding, and playing with her homemade steamboat. This provides the reader some insight into how well the little girl knows the area, background on the little girl, and also gives an idea as to the age range of the child. All of these statements are made with less detail as to add more emphasis to the main point of the story, which is “The Little Store”.

The author uses a lot of sensory description when explaining “The Little Store”. Welty writes, “There are almost tangible smells – licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek” (Welty, 157). Aside from evoking a connection with the smell of licorice this statement also evokes the taste of licorice. She also further details a smell of dill-pickle, ammonia, and mice.

Another sense that was used in the story was sight. The author provides a fairly detailed depiction of the store through the girl’s eyes when she begins to explain the large amount of stock that lines the store shelves. This gives the reader a mental image of the surroundings.

Welty’s comment, “Shelves climbed to high reach all the way around” (Welty, 157) provides a vantage point for the young girl. Through the girl’s eyes the shelves were high reaching as if almost too the roof. It made me think of how I may look at a stadium today with its high-reaching stands that wrap all the way around. I also noticed that the writer describes Mr. Sessions’s store cheese as being “as big as a doll’s house” (Welty, 157). These points reinforce the writers’ technique to create a childlike perspective.



Eudora Welty. “The Little Store” and excerpt from “Storekeeper, 1935.” From The Eye of the Story; Selected Essays and Reviews by Eudora Welty. Copyright 1978 by Eudora Welty. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.