SOURCE: "Weaving Discourse in Thomas Wolfe's 'The Child by Tiger'," in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 45-57.

In the following essay, Gantt analyzes the intermingling of narrative voices, racial ideology, and literary discourse in Wolfe's story "The Child by Tiger."

In the more than fifty years since Thomas Wolfe published "The Child by Tiger," critics have examined the story from a multiplicity of stylistic and thematic viewpoints. Aware of the autobiographical elements in Wolfe's work, some have searched for indications of the artist's life inscribed in his fiction. Many have concentrated on this prolific writer's outpouring of words; others, knowing the story appears in chapter 8 of The Web and the Rock (1939), have regarded how it figures into the Bildungsroman or the Wolfe canon. More recent critics have historicized Wolfe's narrative as a document of class and race tensions of the time.

These disparate views have focused on...