SOURCE: “Death and Repetition in Porter's Miranda Stories,” in American Literature, Vol. 61, No. 4, December, 1989, pp. 610–24.

In the following essay, Cheatham discusses the theme of death in Porter's Miranda stories.

Early in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, in one of Miranda Gay's dreams, Katherine Anne Porter introduces the obsessive center of her final Miranda story, indeed of the whole Miranda series: death, specifically Miranda's perception of her own death. (“The Grave,” Old Mortality, Pale Horse, Pale Rider—the major titles alone reveal as much.) “And the stranger [death]? Where is that lank greenish stranger I remember hanging about the place, welcomed by my grandfather, my great-aunt, my five times removed cousin, my decrepit hound and my silver kitten? Why did they take to him, I wonder? And where are they now? Yet I saw him pass the window in the evening. What else besides them did I have in the...