A good many critics have noted that Eudora Welty's elusive short stories strain toward moments of revelation and discovery, what Welty herself calls the “still moment” in the short story of that title in The Wide Net. It is fiction, Michael Kreyling argues, marked by the desire “for some resolution in but also beyond the plot,” a resolution that illuminates the underlying unity of the dreamlike fragments characterizing so many of her stories. Nowhere, in fact, would this affinity for the “still moment” seem to be more pronounced than in The Wide Net, Welty's second collection of stories, which might more accurately be called a sequence of stories, nearly all of which resonate with brief flashes of illumination and awakening.

In this respect, Welty, who quite often eludes the attempts of her critics to categorize and classify her, appears to ally herself with modernist writers who revere the Word for its capacity to transform and re-create a disorderly and fragmentary world. Historians of the short story, in fact, have argued that such a “still moment,” or epiphany, if you will, serves as the central distinguishing mark of the modernist short story in particular. Yet it is in The Wide Net, published in 1943, that Welty submits the notion of illumination to the sort of radical questioning that contemporary feminist critics and deconstructionists would readily recognize and appreciate, and does so in a form – the short story sequence – that both offers and withdraws the possibility of unity.