A Worn Path - Coursework Example

What is unusual is the grandmother undertakes a long journey from her rural home to a town where the medicine can be obtained for free and she does this despite having to fight off a dog owned by a white hunter, ghostly shadows in the forest she passes through, and a ghost-like scarecrow in a field; there were many obstacles she had to overcome just to reach the town. The inciting incident was the accidental swallowing of the poison lye by her grandchild who suffers. The mid-point is when the grandson died and yet the grandmother keeps making her journey to ask for the same medicine. A climax is when the reader knows the child had been dead for some time already (perhaps for two or three years by now) and the grandmother is maybe delusional. Coda is makers of commercial lye were soon required by law to put warning poison labels on lye cans.

The love of a parent for a child is practically limitless and the love of a grandmother for her grandchildren is even doubly so because being a grandparent, as they say, is like becoming a parent again for the second time. Most often, a grandmother is very protective of her grandchild and loves that child even more than the child's parents themselves. Phoenix Jackson is illiterate, very poor (a charity case, as the nurses at the town clinic refer to her requests for medicine) and walks the long distance just to get the so-called “soothing medicine” despite her old age and frail health. She disregards her years and discomfort just so she can get the needed medicine and yet she does this in a delusional way since the grandson died a few years earlier already. She still makes the journey and suffers condescension and discrimination at the town clinic. The theme of this story is one of love, devotion, and sacrifice for a loved one no matter what.

The truth value of “A Worn Path” is repeated many times in real life when parents and grandparents sacrifice themselves for the sake of the younger generation. This could be in the form of working long hours, doing hard jobs despite the low pay, or suffer discrimination like the grandmother Phoenix Jackson just so she could obtain the needed “soothing medicine” that will help alleviate the pain of her grandson. On a higher level, this love and devotion translate io persistence and perseverance when normal people would have long ago given up and yet a poor and illiterate black-American grandmother did not mind all these just so she can get her aim.  

In some exceptional cases, a parent or grandparent will sacrifice her own life just to save the child.  There is a very strong familial bond between a grandparent and a grandchild because the child is now representing the hopes and aspirations of the grandparent which she may not have attained with her children, and so she pours all her love to the next generation as atonement.