In reference to "A Worn Path," how do I make a distinction between the voice of the narrator and author?I am writing a paper on "A Worn Path" and...

In some stories and novels, the author clearly identifies
himself as a voice in the narrative; The Scarlet Letter comes to
mind as good example. In many works, a character within the story or one who has
knowledge of the events of the story serves as narrator, relating and interpreting
events as he experienced, observed, or learned about them. Identifying the narrator's
voice is not difficult because the narrator has an established identity and definite
point of view. In other stories, like "A Worn Path," the voice we hear is not identified
specifically as that of the author or a separate narrator, and it becomes more difficult
to determine whose voice we are hearing.

"A Worn Path" is
told primarily in the third-person limited point of view, relating what Phoenix Jackson
says and does, but the story occasionally does take an omniscient view of
Phoenix:

Down
there [in the ditch into which she had fallen], her senses drifted away. A dream visited
her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a
pull.

At another point in the
story, Phoenix imagines a little boy handing her a piece of marble cake on a plate, "but
when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air." In these
instances, Eudora Welty takes the reader into Phoenix Jackson's mind, detailing
specifically what she thinks and imagines, which rules out any narrator other than the
author, who has assumed omniscient knowledge.

The question
then becomes whether or not Welty speaks in a voice inconsistent with her own in telling
the story. Her Southern background, personal interviews, and themes developed in other
works do not suggest that she has. All of these facts, taken together, would support the
idea that in this story there is no distinction between the voice of the author and that
of the narrator.