The Life You Save May Be Your Own
This is a repost of an entry from my former TypePad blog. I wrote it when I lived in Washington DC. I've been thinking about Flannery O'Connor today for a couple of reasons:
I was asked by an English teacher to lead a class discussion through O'Connor's signature story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and I may be involved in planning an O'Connor conference here in Orange County.
But, on to The Life You Save May Be Your Own:
Yesterday I read Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
It's haunting, possibly because O'Connor freely borrows key images from a number of her other stories: For example, the image of the car as a vehicle of freedom and justification is used in Wise Blood (with its main character Hazel Motes noting that a man with a good car doesn't need salvation); and the notion of Catholicism as a dismissable unadvanced and "old" religion by a character who hasn't the patience to think deeply about spiritual things is used in The Displaced Person and other places. And, as is common, the story includes a widow with an invalid or idiot adult daughter who is unmarried. (It's interesting how often O'Connor uses this image since she was a physically afflicted, unmarried adult daughter living with a widowed mother. It's self-deprecating, perhaps, and brings recognition of her own need for grace to the forefront of her stories.)
I’ll try to explain my on-going response while reading the story. I began reading it on the subway going to work yesterday morning. I finished it last night on the return home. I’ve been thinking about it this morning and decided to pull out one of my FO’C commentaries (not intentionally a biblical reference, but it’s helpful to have someone else’s reflections and insights when reading Flannery O.)
But, back to the visceral response: As I began to read the story, I realized that I didn’t know it, which was nice because I’ve re-read so many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I got into it, I wanted the story to get along. I wanted it to make progress. I had the impatience common to her characters and I didn’t care for the two main characters, Tom Shiftlet (which appropriately rhymes with Shiftless and he is a scoundrel) and Lucynell Carter, the widow-mother who owned the place that Shiftlet happened upon, who has her own selfish purposes as well. I didn’t like Shiftlet and I didn’t care for his long-windedness, although that’s a usual characteristic of Flannery O’Connor characters – they cover their brokenness by talking a lot about their all-knowing perspective on the world.
Sidenote: I think that I wanted the characters to be more humorous. Like the Grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I wanted characters that made me laugh. None of the five characters in this story entertained me. They were uncomfortably odd.
Shiftlet is physically broken. Although he has skills, he is a carpenter and he fixes Lucynell’s car later in the story, he is a one-armed man, who early on in the story stretches out both arms in a way that signals the redemptive nature of where the story is headed: "He swung out both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross." But the image is lost on Lucynell and her daughter:
“The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.”
The story goes on with Shiftlet making references to deep things that disturb his thinking and that Lucynell thinks are plain foolish. For example, Shiftlet talks about a surgeon in Atlanta who had “taken a knife and cut the human heart” and “studied it like a day-old chicken.” Shiftlet is correct in concluding that the motives of the heart are beyond science. And he makes a reference to European monks who sleep in coffins, a reference O’Connor borrows from a James Joyce story, “The Dead,” but the reference is lost of Lucynell who responds that “they wasn’t as advanced as we are.”
Later Lucynell has Shiftlet marry her daughter in a civil ceremony. But, although it’s "legal," it’s not satisfying to Shiftlet even though it “satisfies the law” as Lucynell tells him. Shiftlet responds that “it’s the law that doesn’t satisfy” him – which expresses a deeper spiritual need that he is currently not aware of.
There’s so much more to the story that I won’t cover here. He ends up in a café called The Hot Spot – where he feels more uncomfortable, and later he picks up a boy (note: good deed to cover up guilt and sin), a hitchhiker, who quickly recognizes Shiftlet as a moral liar and calls Shiftlet’s bluff on his waxing and jumps out of Shiftlet's car in disgust. (Hint: The boy becomes the vehicle of grace in the story.)
I hope that you’ll read it. If so, let me know how you respond to The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
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