More than thirty years after writing the stories in A Curtain of Green, Welty gave the best introduction to their theme and technique in her foreword to One Time, One Place. She spoke of the experience of being invisible behind her Kodak…. (p. 5)

This photographic metaphor for the artist's vision—the snapping of the shutter, the slow process of development, the examination in objectivity and solitude—may also be the best way of reading these early stories. And insofar as the impulse to make an image, to border and thus to define amorphous experience, is the impulse to discover an order in experience, the same metaphor indicates the theme. (pp. 5-6)

[In several of the stories in A Curtain of Green] a main character with some defect, physical, psychological, or moral, is universalized, and a point about the nature of individual human existence is made. The grotesque occupies...