SOURCE: Wilhelm, Albert E. “Images of Initiation in Robert Penn Warren's ‘Blackberry Winter.’” Studies in Short Fiction 17, no. 3 (summer 1980): 343-45.

In the following excerpt, Wilhelm explores the rite of passage motif in “Blackberry Winter” as expressed through the imagery of the Tennessee farm and the biblical themes of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and the Flood.

In analyzing the initiation motif in Robert Penn Warren's “Blackberry Winter,” Richard Allan Davison asserts that in no other story has Warren “better integrated his imagistic patterns.” Davison comments further:

Through this dramatization of a child's rite of passage Warren explores the complications of a nine-year-old farm boy's initiation into the complexities of the adult world largely by centering the most telling imagery on the young protagonist's feet. … The responses of Seth's bare feet serve as indications of his changing awareness of the mystery, uncertainty and evil in the world from...