Flannery O'Connor's Search into the Souls of her Characters
First written in 2008
By high school, readers have learned that there are a number of ways the author of a story portrays character. They include what the character says, what he does, what he thinks, what other characters say about him, and what the narrator tells us. In many of Flannery O’Connor’s stories, it may be more complex. Yes, all of these aspects help us to begin to learn about the men, women, and children who inhabit her works, but there’s something else. According to the back page of O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, the author’s stated purpose for writing was “to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life.”
In the third story of A Good Man. . . , a small piece titled “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the author tells of a drifter arriving one sunset evening at the rural home of an old woman and her mute, intellectually handicapped daughter. The woman, Lucynell Crater, isn’t worried because “she could tell, even from a distance, that he was a tramp and no one to be afraid of” (47). And it seems she is right. The man, Tom T. Shiftlet, has half of his left arm missing and in his right hand he is carrying a tool box. Do thugs, scoundrels, and n’er-do-wells carry tool boxes? Surely not. And when Mr. Shiftlet expresses an interest in fixing an old Ford in the yard, a car that hasn’t run in fifteen years, we’re certain that here’s a man who has some practical skills and the gumption to attempt the impossible. Adding to this positive resume is the feeling that, although a drifter, Shiftlet is also a philosopher. Only a philosopher would say to Mrs. Crater, “Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit. The body. . . is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move. . .” (57).
So when Mrs. Crater decides that it might be a good idea to have a handyman around the house, especially if he would marry her daughter, the reader can understand her reasoning. Here’s a hard worker who has been able to get the old Ford running and who hasn’t tried to rob or harm her or her daughter in any way. When Shiftlet expresses a mild interest in Lucynell the daughter, Mrs. Crater eventually realizes she has to bargain to get the man to agree to the marriage. She offers the car (along with a new paint job) and fifteen dollars for a weekend trip, but Shiftlet holds out for seventeen-fifty.
The marriage takes place in the Ordinary’s office a few days later. Leaving the courthouse, though, Shiftlet “looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted while someone held him. ‘That didn’t satisfy me none’” (58), he says, whereupon Mrs. Crater, perhaps worried that Shiftlet might be trying to renege on his new commitment, snaps, “It satisfied the law” (58).
Quite suddenly, we begin to wonder who these people really are and what they really want. Has Mrs. Crater discarded her daughter, handicapped to the point that she is more of a prop than a real person, to the lowest bidder? And why has Shiftlet agreed to this deal? Yes, he got an old car and a few dollars, but is that terribly important to this drifter-philosopher?
When daughter Lucynell and Shiftlet are getting ready to leave on their weekend honeymoon, Mrs. Crater tells her new son-in-law: “And I wouldn’t let no man have her but you because I seen you would do right” (59). She tears up when bidding her daughter goodbye, but the daughter doesn’t notice her mother or her tears. The newlyweds pull away, and before two hours have passed, Shiftlet becomes “depressed in spite of the car” (59-60) and pulls over at a small-town eating place and orders lunch for the young Lucynell. The drive has made her sleepy and she nods off as they wait for her ham and grits. Shiftlet pays the bill and tells the cook to give her the food when she wakes up, explaining that she’s a hitch-hiker and that he has to leave.
On the road, Shiftlet becomes more depressed. He likes company, the narrator tells us, and he decides that a man with a car has a responsibility to others, so if he sees a hitch-hiker, he’ll pick him up. Sure enough, he sees a boy with a suitcase standing at the edge of the road and stops for him. Trying to get the boy to talk, Shiftlet begins waxing philosophic about his mother. “My mother was an angel of Gawd” (61), he tells the boy, using the exact words that the cook in the diner used when describing the sleeping Lucynell, whereupon the boy curses him, his mother, and his own mother and jumps from the slow-moving car. It shocks Shiftlet to the point that he raises his arm to his breast and prays, “Oh Lord! . . . Break forth and wash the slime from the earth!” (62).
If this is, in fact, an example of revealing God’s grace in the life of the common man—O’Connor’s stated intent in her stories—it most certainly is couched in mysterious circumstances. What are we, the readers, to think of Mr. Shiftlet and Mrs. Crater, both of whom see themselves as good, hard-working, longsuffering members of the human race? I believe it is in these two people that O’Connor recognizes the very core of humanity’s inconsistency and deviousness and self-righteousness. These characters, and many others like them in this amazing collection, carry their mysteries, secret and hidden, in their hearts until their real motivations are suggested, more like a fog light in the dim and drizzle of night than like a spotlight in a dark attic. The effect leaves the reader reeling.
Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. San Diego:
Harvest, 1976.