What if you were given a chance to start over and do things differently? To make up for your mistakes, right your wrongs? This idea is featured as a theme in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, published in the 1953 Spring issue of The Kenyon Review (Kenyon College). The story is about a homeless man by the name of “Shiftlet” who approaches an isolated, run-down farm where “Mrs.Crater” and her mentally retarded daughter “Lucynell” lives. Crater offers Shiftlet a home to stay in if he’d do some fix-up jobs around the place, mainly on the car he’s been eyeing. As the story progresses, Crater sees that Lucynell has an affection towards Shiftlet and tries to get him to marry her. Shiftlet does marry her because he is offered honeymoon money and the car. However, during the honeymoon, Shiftlet abandons Lucynell at some diner on the highway. As he heads towards his destination, “Mobile”, he pikes up a young hitchhiker and begins lecturing him about morals. The hitchhiker becomes enraged and jumps out of the car, leaving Shiftlet to ask God to "break forth and wash the slime from this earth" (O’Connor). The short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” can best be analyzed by looking into Flannery O’Connor’s background, the time period the story was published, the theme, and the irony and symbolism used in the story.
The idea for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” can be found by looking into the literary movement of that era, Christian realism. Christian realism was developed by Reinhold Niebuhr in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea of Christian Realism is heaven can not be achieved by those on Earth because the human nature is corrupt and morally flawed (Niebuhr). O’Connor highlights that heave...
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"The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own Summary." BookRags. BookRags, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Print.
O'Connor, Flannery. "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Literature: American Literature. Evanston: McDougal Littel, 2009. 1034-043. Print. 08 Apr. 2014.
Watson, Jerilyn. "American History: Life in the 1950s." VOA: Learning English. VOA, 28 June 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
In the text “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by Flannery O’Connor, a common mood emerges from the somewhat humorous yet unfortunate work. A mood of grotesqueness among the characters and overall story as it presents itself, generally, making the audience feel quite uneasy and uncomfortable while reading it. Grotesque is a literary style, which comically and somewhat repulsively represents a distorted character or a series of twisted actions or thoughts that embody a character. The text creates a grotesque mood simply because the actions carried out by the characters resemble an extreme sense of despair and uneasiness, yet the way in which it is executed is somewhat funny and jocular to the reader, therefore creating an awkward overall mood
Coontz, Stephanie. “What We Missed About the 1950s.” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. 9th ed. Eds. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. 27-43. Print.
Kallen, Stuart A. Through the Decades: The 1950’s. A Cultural History of the United States. San Diego: Lucent Books, Inc, 1999.
[15] Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977) 280.
The 1950s seemed like a perfect decade. The rise of suburbs outside cities led to an expansion of the middle class, thus allowing more Americans to enjoy the luxuries of life. The rise of these suburbs also allowed the middle class to buy houses with land that used to only be owned by more wealthy inhabitants. Towns like Levittown-one of the first suburbs- were divided in such a way that every house looked the same (“Family Structures”). Any imperfections were looked upon as unfavorable to the community as a whole. Due to these values, people today think of the 1950s as a clean cut and model decade. This is a simplistic perception because underneath the surface, events that took place outside the United States actually had a direct effect on our own country’s history. The rise of Communism in Russia struck fear into the hearts of the American people because it seemed to challenge their supposedly superior way of life.
Morgan, Michael L., ed. Classics of Moral and Political Theory. 3rd Edition. Indianapolis. Hackett, 2001.
The fifties era was an era of consensus and order. As a family, there was a certain image to live up to in order fit into the American dream; however, a family only had to appear American and while it may be argued that Doris Goodwin succeeded in life because she grew up in a typical household in the fifties, that is not the case, and in fact, Goodwin’s life in the fifties did not live up to the stereotypical idea of the fifties time period. The image of being American during the fifties was based on consensus which was seen through the typical American neighborhood. All families were religious, the dads went to work while the moms stayed home and the children were at school, and each family had a favorite baseball team; however, it was not the idea of consensus that allowed Goodwin to succeed in life. (Anderson Class note, “Life at Home in the 50’s” 3 April 2014; Anderson Class notes, “Book Discussion” 8 April 2014)
Of the two essay’s I had to choose from in my reader’s choice options I decided on “The Good Short Life” by Dudley Clendinen. A very strong subject on this essay and with a powerful message sent by the author himself about life. The rhetorical pattern, narration, is used by Clendinen to help successfully deliver his message with personal details about choices Clendinen made about his life.
Morgan, Michael L., ed. Classics of Moral and Political Theory. 5th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.
Oates surprised many readers when she wrote from a man’s perspective, but she still wrote a great story. In What I Lived For her main focus was conflict. The reader was hooked from the beginning and kept interest as the scandalous story developed. These conflicts contributed to, not only the reader’s interest, but also the novel’s plot and theme.
Farber, David, and Beth Bailey. The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
John Bodar, “Unruly Adults: Social Change and Mass Culture in the 1950s”, OAH Magazine of History 26 no. 4 (2012): 22.
Pill, the. People & events: mrs. America: women's roles in the 1950s. Retrieved January 25,
The 1950s was a time when conformity held supreme in the culture at large. Issues such as women 's rights were thrown to the back as people tried to remain in the popular form of a family. These issues being put off only caused the prolonging of the tumultuous 1960s that would soon
Many individuals have different aspects as to how life should be valued. Some individuals live life a day at a time while attempting to make the most as if their last breath was upcoming. In a Stanford Commencement in 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs quo...