Clearing In The Sky By Jesse Stuart

Getting Through "Clearing In The Sky" By Jesse Stuart

I ran into this story back when I was teaching a Southern literature seminar at a community college, and honestly, it is the kind of text that looks deceptively simple until you actually try to dissect it with students. Most people breeze through it in ten minutes, nod, and move on. The story itself is from Stuart's 1948 collection and it centers on a man named Bill Williams who has spent his whole life in the Kentucky hills, wrestling with grief after his wife dies, and gradually learning that the mountain landscape itself holds a kind of stubborn grace that does not care whether you are broken or not. That is the basic summary. What actually happens underneath is where people get tripped up. The narrative moves through three distinct phases and that matters more than most readers realize. The first phase establishes Bill's isolation. He is not just lonely, he is functionally severed from the community that raised him because he cannot bear to look at the faces of people who knew his wife. He takes to wandering the hills alone. The second phase introduces the natural imagery—the sky clearing, the animals, the changing light. This is not decorative. Stuart is building a direct parallel between Bill's internal state and the weather patterns of the mountain. The third phase delivers the resolution, which is deliberately understated. Bill does not have a dramatic emotional breakthrough. He simply observes a clearing in the sky, watches a hawk circle, and accepts that grief does not disappear but coexists with beauty. That ambiguity is intentional and it is what separates this story from sentimental melodrama. I once tried using this text in a creative writing workshop to show students how understatement works, and three of them wrote responses where the protagonist literally cried at the end. I had to pull them aside and explain that Stuart is doing the opposite of that. The power comes from what is refused, not what is displayed. If you read it expecting catharsis, you will miss the point entirely.

Where to Find the Full Text

The story appears in several of Jesse Stuart's collections, most reliably in "The Clearing in the Sky and Other Kentucky Stories." You can also find it included in various anthologies of Appalachian literature and Southern short fiction. If you are looking for a free digital copy, the full text is available through Project Gutenberg and some university course reserves. I usually point students toward the Jesse Stuart page on Project Gutenberg, though availability of specific titles there can shift depending on when you check. The printed collections tend to be more reliable if you need a stable pagination for citations, since different editions sometimes have minor textual variations that matter if you are doing close reading. A word of caution: do not rely on random blog posts or PDFs hosted on obscure sites. Several of those have typos and missing lines that throw off analysis. A clean edition from a reputable publisher or a major archive is worth the extra five minutes of searching.

Reading It Right — Techniques and Common Pitfalls

The biggest mistake I see is treating the mountain setting as mere scenery. In Stuart's work, the landscape is an active participant. When he describes the way light falls through the pines or how the sky opens up after a storm, he is mapping Bill's emotional trajectory without ever stating it outright. The technique is what literary scholars call environmental symbolism, but in practice it is less academic and more like reading the weather. You learn to pay attention to shifts in tone and imagery the way a farmer learns to read clouds. Here is a specific problem I encountered: a student argued that the hawk in the story represented God. When I asked her to show me textual evidence for that reading, she could not produce a single line that supported it. The hawk is present, yes, but it is a hawk. Interpreting every animal symbol as divine intervention flattens Stuart's very secular, very earthbound spirituality. He is not writing religious allegory. He is writing about a man who finds solace in the physical world because the metaphysical world stopped making sense after his wife died. That distinction is crucial and it changes how you read nearly every passage in the final third. Another nuance that gets missed: Bill's relationship to the other mountain people. He does not reject them out of pride or arrogance. He rejects them because their ordinary compassion feels like salt in a wound. Stuart handles this with remarkable restraint. There is no scene where Bill angrily confronts someone. He simply disappears into the hills and lets the distance do the work. When you write about withdrawal, that kind of quietness is much harder to pull off than a dramatic argument. Most writers would have Bill lash out. Stuart refuses that shortcut and the story is stronger for it.

Teaching or Studying the Story — What Actually Works

If you are assigning this in a classroom or studying it on your own, I recommend reading it aloud at least once before analyzing it. The prose has a rhythm that comes from Appalachian speech patterns—longer, rolling sentences that mimic the cadence of mountain conversation. When you read silently, you skip over that musicality. When you read it out loud, you hear it. That is not a gimmick. It changes how you perceive the pacing and the emotional weight of key passages. The story runs approximately 3,000 to 3,500 words depending on the edition, which means it can be covered in a single class period or study session without rushing. Plan for about forty-five minutes of reading time and another forty-five minutes of discussion or annotation. Anything shorter and you are skimming. Anything longer and you will either overwhelm students with analysis or run out of text to work with.

Limitations — When This Story Does Not Work

For all its strengths, "Clearing In The Sky" has real limitations. The prose style, while effective, is firmly rooted in mid-twentieth-century Appalachian realism. Readers accustomed to more experimental or psychologically complex narratives may find it slow or even naive. The character development is minimal by design—Stuart is not interested in interior monologue or stream of consciousness. He shows you a man through action and setting, and if that approach feels insufficient to you, nothing about the story will change your mind. It is not a flaw in the story, it is a flaw in the fit between reader and text. Additionally, some modern critics have pointed out that Stuart's portrayal of mountain life can slip into sentimentality, particularly in how he romanticizes poverty and isolation. The story itself avoids the worst of this tendency, but the broader body of his work does not always. If you are using "Clearing In The Sky" as a gateway to Stuart's fiction, be prepared to encounter passages where the sentimentality outweighs the insight. In those cases, switching to a different author like George Abbott or Harriett Arnow might give you the same regional texture with more psychological depth. The story remains a solid entry point into Appalachian literature and a useful tool for teaching subtlety in characterization, but it is not a universal favorite. Knowing where it works and where it does not will save you a lot of frustration, whether you are teaching it or studying it on your own.