Katherine Anne Porter's story "Noon Wine" has been labeled a masterpiece by some critics. In this story, Porter addresses the issue of the human capacity for violence, and Porter herself has said of the story that "everyone in this story contributes, one way or another directly or indirectly, to murder, or death by violence" (Walsh 84). J. Oates Smith says that the story has not received much critical analysis because "it is empty of the customary furniture of modern fiction--notably consistent metaphor or symbolism" (Smith 157), and Smith proposes his own analysis of the elements that make the story effective. Thomas F. Walsh bases his analysis largely on its depiction of character, and he relates the story to the literary subgenre of the double.
Smith finds reasons why the different elements of fiction tht do appear in this story are inherently different from those same characteristics found in other fiction. He notes that the setting is pastoral, for instance, but further states that this differs from the use of the pastoral in works like Hawthorne's Marble Faun or Henry James's Turn of the Screw because here "the real psychological world has not been stylized and writ small, so that events in a place-dominated or family-dominated society may be understood to work toward defining similar strains in the larger, hence more real world" (Smith 157-158). He says there are elements of tragedy in the story but that Porter "refuses to exploit it or to transform it into existential comedy" (Smith 157) as other writers do.
Much of what Smith says sounds like criticism of Porter, though his only basis seems to be that she does not write the way other writers do or develop the same genres they do. Yet, he finds that her fictional approach produces a masterpiece based on irony "because the ostensible story, the plot, is a trick to disguise the real story" (Smith 162). Actually, this could be said of some works by many o...