APPEARANCE AND REALITY

Appearance and truth in Literature

Appearance and Reality in Literature

This paper presents an anlysis of three literary works with a common theme. A Good Man is hard to find by Flannery O'Connor, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and Trifles by Susan Glaspel share the theme mentioned below.

Common Theme

Life's lessons, although usually important, can often be very painful.



A Good Man is hard to find by Flannery O'Connor

This intensely ironic story investigates with horrifying effect what happens when one of the worst anxieties of modern life, the threat of sudden violence at the hands of an unknown assailant, becomes a reality. Because such occurrences are relatively rare, the characters and the reader are lulled into a false security that such a thing will never happen to them. In addition, by voicing anxiety about encountering a psychopathic killer, the grandmother makes such an encounter seem all the more unlikely (Dymkowski, 2008).

From Flannery O'Connor's point of view, the grandmother's encounter with The Misfit presents her with the supreme test and the supreme opportunity that every human being must face: the moment of death. Her death, moreover, comes through the agency of an apparently gratuitous and incomprehensible evil. Her ability to accept such a death is therefore the supreme test of her faith.

As O'Connor once described it, “she realizes . . . thead covering she is to blame for the man before her and connected to him by binds of kinship which have their origins deep in the mystery she has been only prattling about so far.” (Cheatham, 1985)

The action of grace is not confined altogether to the grandmother but begins to undermine The Misfit's own egotism and sadism. Insisting on the possibility of redemption for even this most evil of her characters, O'Connor expressed the hope that “the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become.” In O'Connor's own words, this story, like all of her fiction, “takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my use of it may not always be apparent. . . . Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.” (Zoller, 1977)

O'Connor had a gift for being able to capture the natural speech patterns of the inhabitants of her South, and her ironic humor is unmatched. The stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find also demonstrate her superior use of symbolism. The peacocks mentioned in “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and “The Displaced Person” are symbolic of God's presence; Father Flynn makes direct comparisons between the mysterious beauty of the peacock's tail and Christ's transfiguration. Descriptions of setting in O'Connor's stories are nearly always symbolic as well. The moon appears symbolically twice in “The Artificial Nigger,” signifying the unknown aspects of himself ...