How would you characterize Granny Weatherall in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"?

Of course, the stream of consciousness narrative adopted
by the author gives us a real insight into Granny Weatherall's character. Clearly, if
you read this story, hopefully you cannot fail to identify the humour in this story -
from its very start, the character of Granny Weatherall dominates the pages and is funny
and sad in turn. Even the start of the story presents us with a funny moment as Granny
Weatherall shows her defiant spirit by her comment about the
doctor:

She
flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry's pudgy careful fingers and pulled the
sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the
country with spectacles on his nose! "Get along now, take your schoolbooks and go.
There's nothing wrong with
me!"

Of course, what is funny
about this is that we think of doctors as being respectful figures in society -
certainly figures we do not address and think of like this. The juxtaposition with the
term of contempt "brat" and doctor shocks us and makes us laugh by revealing the kind of
character that Granny Weatherall is. This continues throughout the story as we see the
irreverent attitude revealed towards other characters such as Father
Connolly.

You might like to think of how conflict reveals
the character of Granny Weatherall. It is clear that the external conflict that Granny
Weatherall is facing is her stubbornness and determination against the mollycoddling (as
she sees it) that she is receiving from her daughter Cornelia, and others, such as
Doctor Harry and Father Connolly:

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Well, she could just hear Cornelia telling her
husband that Mother was getting a little childish and they'd have to humour her. The
thing that most annoyed her was that Cornelia thought she was deaf, dumb and blind.
Little hasty glances and tiny gestures tossed around her and over her head saying,
"Don't cross her, let her have her way, she's eighty years old," and she sitting there
as if she lived in a thin glass
cage.

Granny Weatherall is
still a determined and proud woman, who is not giving in easily to death and the care
that others try to foist on her.

The internal conflict is
of course revealed in Granny Weatherall's memory of her jilting that still hurts her
even though it was so long ago. As she struggles to come to terms with it she shows how
she still remembers and is pained by the memory:

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Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice
in the top of her mind. Don't let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty
of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren't you? Then stand up to it. Here eyelids
wavered and let in streamers of blue-gray light like tissue paper over her
eyes.

Here we see Granny
Weatherall trying to convince herself that she wasn't hurt and trying to pull herself
together, but the final description reveals that the memory of her jilting still hurts
enough to bring tears to her eyes. Of course, the story ends with a second "jilting" as
Granny Weatherall resolves the internal conflict and accepts the fact that we are all
"jilted" in death - that we die alone and that this solitude is greater than any loss we
know in life. Yet the end of the story shows Granny Weatherall's strength and
determination in the face of this ultimate jilting.