"Tempting providence": The absurd humor of Eudora Welty's "Losing Battles"

The function of humor in Eudora Welty's work is to allow the reader access to her experiential world through language in order to reveal the multivalent life process, the insulating network of ritualistic endurance, and the dignified grace of ill-fated defiance. Exaggerated stereotypes and mythical allusions provide a way of entry into the fictional world of Losing Battles. Using vernacular dialogue and absurd actions as virtually her sole method of character development, Welty represents the elemental vitality of her characters whose will to persevere is reflected in their endless autobiographical storytelling. By recreating the family with talk, Welty's characters are able to shrug off the impinging reality that threatens their Sisyphian effort to survive. Her use of a self-conscious Southern idiom invites a phenomenological reading revealing the ultimately life-affirming pattern that informs the novel and gives shape to her fundamental comic spirit.