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Flannery O 'Connor's The Life You Save May Be Your Own'

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Flannery O’Connor’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own is about a young man with good intentions, a girl that represents the innocence left in the world, and a mother that is selfish. He speaks of how corrupt the world is and how there are no good people left; he becomes a hypocrite when he conforms to the world and does the things he said he would never do. O’Connor writes this story to show that the world is degrading and there are hardly any genuine people left. O’Connor uses diction to express her anger and sorrow for what the world is becoming. Tom Shiftlet arrives at Lucynell and her mother’s house and starts explaining there is “no good left in this world.” He finds a car in their barn and gets a fascination with it; it hasn’t ran in years and he says “he [is] even going to make that automobile run.” This represents a bible analogy because Tom sees this as bringing someone back from the dead. He thinks that he is one of few good people left in the world. While Tom represents a Jesus figure, Lucynell represents “a pawn in a game of chess.” (Welock, 2009) It is obvious that …show more content…

The mother also represents selfishness because throughout the story she tries to force everything to be her way. When she talks to Shiftlet she hints at him that “no man on earth is going to take that sweet girl of [hers] away.” Her sneaky and evil ways begin to come over Shiftlet and she tells him that she knows he won’t take her daughter away from her. In reality the mother wants to get rid of Lucynell in the easiest way possible. She compliments on how innocent she is and uses Shiftlet’s comments on how he wants an innocent girl against him. The mother pretty much forces Shiftlet to marry Lucynell and take her away from

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