The metaphors and hidden meanings of Welty's A Wide Net

Eudora Welty's story The Wide Net, in her "Collected Stories" (and the title story of her 2nd volume, from I think 1943), is one of those that narrate a simple and straightforward action but in fact suggest a far deeper meaning - not that it's an allegory, but that the action of the story is a metaphor of or an "imitation" of a a greater action. The story tells of a young man who comes home from a night of drinking and finds that his wife has gone and left him a note that she's drowned herself in the river. Improbably, he recruits his drinking buddy to help him drag the river to search for his wife's body. The two of them set off and over the course of the morning assemble a comically motley crew of men to help with this weird project, two big families (the Doyles and the Malones - this is in Mississippi, not Ireland), a locutions old "Doc" who loans them the wide net, two black boys (one of the few early Welty stories that includes blacks) - the drag the river, come up with lots of fish and some alligators, stop on a riverbank and cook and eat the fish, all go to sleep, meander on home where, unsurprisingly, the wife awaits. Story in its comic nature and its weird sense of community and common task, is somehow Chaucerian - like one of the "bawdy" tales in its raucous agrarian spirit with allegorical and religious intimations - what is it about? In some ways about a search for truth, god, salvation - hopelessly looking in the wrong place when in fact salvation resides nearby, within grasp? About the hidden plenitude of our world?