Her sojourn in the country coincided with a period of emotional distress for Porter, as her difficult marriage with John Henry Koontz was ending.
[3][4] Porter acknowledged her difficulties in developing its narrative: "Holiday" represents one of my prolonged struggles, not with questions of form and style, but my own moral and emotional collision with a human situation I was too young to cope with at the time it occurred.
[6][7] The story is told from a first-person point-of-view by of a young woman, who, though unnamed, is likely Porter herself, dramatizing a reminiscence from her youth.The narrator seeks a temporary sanctuary from unspecified difficulties, and is advised by a former classmate to spend her spring holiday in an East Texas agrarian community in the home of the Müllers, a prosperous family of second- and third-generation German immigrant-farmers.
An avid reader of Das Kapital, he preaches a distorted form of socialism that serves to rationalize his own position as the largest landholder in the county and its chief rentier (accent, italics).
She is openly contemptuous of her husband's atheism, but no less clannish; she wishes her daughters to marry local suitors, so as not to wed outsiders and leave home.
The fact that Ottilie is socially shunned by her parents and siblings, exposes a brutalizing and inhumane element in the otherwise healthy and self-satisfied Müller clan.
The narrator, witnessing the daughter's anguished and inarticulate grief at the loss of her mother, harnesses up a wagon and with Ottilie goes in pursuit of the funeral procession.
Here, the first-person point-of-view serves to convey the highly personal nature of the story, a youthful experience understood fully only in hindsight of maturity.
[12][13] Two "holidays" are experienced in the story: On the one hand is the narrator's temporary sanctuary from her personal or professional troubles, and on the other, a brief, but ecstatic catharsis for the disabled servant Ottilie who is condemned to a life of household drudgery.
Literary critic James T. F. Tanner offers this passage as an example: Winter in this part of the south is a moribund coma, not the northern death sleep with sure promise of resurrection.