The Facade of Tattoos

The Facade of Tattoos

In "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor, the tattoos O.E. Parker receives are crucial to the reader’s understanding of him. Furthermore, O'Connor suggests them as major symbols throughout Parker's life. Parker, the main character in this story, goes through the actions of life without really knowing who he is and why he is on the earth. “Parker gradually experiences religious conversion and, though tattooed all over the front of his body, is drawn to having a Byzantine tattoo of Christ placed on his back…, O’Connor was using unusual symbols to convey her sense of the mystery of God’s redemptive power (Shackelford, p 1800).” Because of the tattoos, the reader is able to see O'Connor reveal the major characteristics in Parker's life and sympathize with this man as he searches for his identity and finds God.

First of all, in order to understand O’Connor’s short story, the reader must look into the background of her life. “Parker’s Back” was the last story written by O’Connor before she died at the early age of thirty-nine from the disease of Lupus. Her writings all reflect from her religious background of Catholicism. “O’Connor wrote brilliant stories that brought the issue of religious faith into clear dramatic focus. She was a devout Roman Catholic living in predominantly Protestant rural Georgia. Her stories are far from pious; in fact, their mode is usually shocking and often bizarre. Yet the religious issues they raise are central to her work (Drake, online vertical file--------------------------------).” “Time and again in her stories, the spokesmen for a self-satisfied secularism run afoul of representatives of... the God-haunted protagonists…they play an indispensable role…they act as spiritual catalysts…(CLC, p276………………………………….).” “To even the casual reader it would appear that Miss O’Connor really had only one story to tell and really only one main character. This principal character is, of course, Jesus Christ; and her one story is man’s absolutely crucial encounter with Him (Drake, p273).”

Being a devout Catholic, O’Connor’s “faith consciously informed her fiction. The difficulty of her work, she explained…is that many of her readers do not understand the redemptive quality of ‘grace,’ and, she added, ‘don’t recognize it when they see it. All my stories are...

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... this image O’Connor graphically conveys the suffering of Christ incarnate in humanity, and expresses her belief that convergence with Christ means union with Christ’s suffering, not escape from suffering into some abstract realm of spiritual bliss…emphasizing that the rising in consciousness that precedes true convergence is expressed not through external power or dominance over others but, paradoxically, in a descent into vulnerability, into suffering, into weakness, into man’s essential poverty (CLC p 159).” It is in this last scene that the reader becomes sympathetic with Obadiah Elihue, having been driven out of the house by his harridan wife, “leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.”

Through the descriptions of Parker's tattoos, one can make connections between the "pictures" he has "drawn all over him" and what goes on in his actual life. O'Connor uses the tattoo symbols to reveal the growth of the protagonist, for it takes him years to get past his outer image of his body, to examine his own soul. One begins to sympathize with this man, "Obadiah Elihue," as he searches for himself and finds peace with God.