SOURCE: Dietrich, Bryan. “Christ or Antichrist: Understanding Eight Words in ‘Blackberry Winter.’” Studies in Short Fiction 29, no. 2 (spring 1992): 215-20.

In the following essay, Dietrich examines the last line in “Blackberry Winter” and declares that the tramp symbolizes a duality of good and evil, both an Antichrist figure of disillusionment with religion and a messenger of hope.

For four and half decades readers, professors, and critics seem to have stumbled, at least the first time through, over the last line of Robert Penn Warren's short story, “Blackberry Winter.” If we know the basic storyline, the adult narrator's final, backward-looking observation, “But I did follow him, all the years,” is plain enough on the surface. It simply refers to the tramp of the story and to an experience the narrator is remembering in the context of 35 interim years. But as readers, we know there is a deeper level, and it...