Flannery O\'Connor the Life You

Flannery O'Connor "The Life You Save May be Your Own"

Satire, Religious Irony and Symbolism, and Southern Literary Elements in Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May be Your Own"

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "The Life You Save May be Your Own," two transparently immoral main (and opposing) characters, the older Lucynell, mother to a deaf daughter by that same name, and ever-wandering Mr. Shiftlet, drive the action. It unfolds from a distinctly Southern (i.e., in a literary sense: depicting bizarre, grotesque images and family ties much like Faulkner; Welty, and others) viewpoint, using distinct Catholic symbolism (e.g., the maimed cross for imperfect humanity). Action and resolution underscore truths and possibilities (and the lack of them) of deliverance from dark corners of the human heart.

Three relatively minor characters in "The Life you save may be Your Own" - daughter Lucynell; the Hot Spot's boy behind the counter who finds young Lucynell "an angel of Gawd" (O'Connor) as Mr. Shiftlet escapes without paying her food bill; and the non-hitchhiker near the end - further underscore the questionable motivations of the major characters. Both mother Lucynell and Mr. Shiftlet, whose opposing drives compel the plot, are transparently self-interested. Lucynell the elder wants a fix-it man around. Mr. Shiftlet is on the take, as O'Connor reveals early: "Mr. Shiftlet's pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard?... And had moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile. 'You ladies drive?' he asked" (O'Connor).

Later on, once behind the wheel of the old Ford, now repaired and running, Mr. Shiftlet recalls that: "He had always wanted an automobile but he had never been able to afford one before" ("The Life you Save May be Your Own"). He cannot afford one now either, but that is no longer important. The ending focuses on Mr. Shiftlet's "quick getaway," not on either of the Lucynells once both have been left behind by Mr. Shiftlet. For his part, Mr. Shiftlet here reveals himself the "slime from this earth" (O'Connor, "The Life You Save May be Your Own"), e.g., a conniving car thief and cruel opportunist riding off (with the full $17.50 he pried out of Lucynell the elder) and not even paying for snoring new wife's "Last Supper."

Soon afterward a non-hitchhiker Mr. Shiftlet picks up (anyway) cannot stomach his driver's lugubrious "My mother was an angel of Gawd" (O'Connor). Bolting, he leaves Mr. Shiftlet alone and miserable. Dark thunderclouds now literally crowd around him, the worst "crouched behind the car" ("The Life You Save May be Your Own"). Mr. Shiftlet, his almost-empty shirtsleeve flapping outside the driver's window, begins driving into a storm: a stray lone wolf outside Noah's Ark. As the storm is about to "Break forth and wash the slime from this earth" (O'Connor) Mr. Shiftlet seems, especially now, a demon of deceit. But there is also more to him. O'Connor states early in the story, that against "an expanse of sky... his figure formed a crooked cross" [emphasis added]. A "crooked cross" is still a cross, if imperfect. Mr. Shiftlet says later:

lemme tell you something. There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken knife and cut the human heart -- the human heart,... out of a man's chest and held it in his hand," "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady," he don't know no more about it than you or me (O'Connor, "The Life

You Save May be Your Own")

Here he is arguably a prophet seeing clearly the best and the worst human capacities, entwined. For all his frothy declarations about purity, he is most impure. His foil (he thinks), Lucynell the elder, is no better. He sees in his/her own opportunism.