[In the following essay, Coulthard considers sin and redemption in four of O'Connor's short stories: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Revelation,” and “Parker's Back.”]

In a 1958 letter, Flannery O'Connor discussed the major theme of her writing: “It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing. … The action of grace changes a character. … All my stories are about the action of grace on a character.”¹ Like many of O'Connor's statements about her writing, this one is useful if it is properly qualified. Most of O'Connor's stories, of course, are about sin and redemption, but not all of them actually depict “the action of grace on a character.”

In seven stories, for instance, O'Connor clears the way for a character's redemption but stops short of delineating it. The stories freeze the protagonists in their moment of spiritual truth and do not reveal whether they will in fact accept the salvation proffered.² These open-ended stories are best described by what O'Connor said of one of them, “The Enduring Chill”: “It's not so much a story of conversion as of self-knowledge, which I suppose has to be the first step in conversion” (HB [The Habit of Being], p. 299).

The stories which leave the question of salvation unanswered include some of O'Connor's best, such as “Good Country People” and “The Lame Shall Enter First,” but in writing them the author was able to avoid the task of realistically describing the effects of conversion. O'Connor was well aware of the aesthetic problems inherent in depicting grace in fiction. She stated in “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” “Part of the complexity of the problem for the Catholic fiction writer will be the presence of grace as it appears in nature, and what matters for him is that his faith not become detached from his dramatic sense.”³ Writing about spiritual triumph must have been a special challenge for a writer who once said, “I … hate pious language … because I believe the realities it hides” (HB, p. 227).

The near impossibility of depicting grace abounding in converted sinners without resorting to pious or doctrinaire prose may be one reason that in three conversion stories—“The River,” “Greenleaf,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—grace and death strike at virtually the same moment. O'Connor said, “You can't tell about conversion until you live with it a while” (HB, p. 299), but in only four of her short stories do the protagonists get the chance. An examination of these four stories reveals that O'Connor, in depicting the advent and aftermath of grace, did not always live up to her dictum that “In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense,”⁴ but when she did, she did it in fine style.

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the earliest of these four stories, begins as a satire with moral undertones and degenerates into a morality play which is neither amusing nor particularly instructive. Wendell and Cory, who are “both going to be Church of God preachers because you don't have to know nothing to be one,”⁵ are hilarious country bumpkins. When these backwoods Lotharios come courting, they sit on the banisters “like monkeys, their knees on a level with their shoulders and their arms hanging down between,” as one of them croons “a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn” (p. 240). This humorous mingling of the sacred and the profane is continued in the portrait of the two convent girls who call themselves Temple One and Temple Two: “They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs … all their sentences began, ‘You know this boy I know one time he …’” (p. 236).

The dramatic and theological success of “Temple,” however, depends on the credibility of its twelve year-old protagonist, an unnamed girl with fat cheeks and braces, and she is the least convincing character in the story. She is so immature that she giggles uncontrollably at her own inane jokes, such as the suggestion that Miss Kirby's middle-aged admirer show her two fourteen year-old cousins around, and she doesn't know where baby rabbits come from; yet she supposedly understands the spiritual essence of the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost and realizes that she is “slothful” and “eaten up also with the sin of Pride, the worst one” (p. 243). O'Connor said, “The writer has to make the corruption believable before he can make the grace meaningful” (HB, p. 516), but the protagonist of “Temple” is more of a bratty adolescent than a corrupt sinner. O'Connor wrote “A” that “‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost’ all revolves around what is purity” (HB, p. 117), but the protagonist is much too slight to support such a weighty theme.

O'Connor's attempt to motivate the child's conversion and to inject profundity results in the most bizarre symbol in her fiction. The two visiting cousins return from a carnival with the story of an hermaphrodite who has told the crowd, “God made me thisaway. … This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain't disputing His way” (p. 245). This spiel has a powerful effect on the girl. She dreams about it and mentally hears it again as she takes communion at the climax of the story.

The hermaphrodite is intended to serve as an epiphany for the young girl. O'Connor said, “As near as I get to saying what purity is in this story is saying that it is an acceptance of what God wills for us, an acceptance of our individual circumstances” (HB, p. 124). But it is very difficult to apply this statement to O'Connor's protagonist. Certainly her chubby cheeks and braces aren't afflictions on the same order as the hermaphrodite's abnormality, and the girl has had no trouble accepting herself from the beginning of the story. “I'm not as old as you all,” she tells her cousins, “but I'm about a million times smarter” (p. 245).

By the story's conclusion, O'Connor has completely abandoned her earlier comic texture, and her moral sense has left her dramatic one in the dust. Both O'Connor's intention and the heavy-handed symbolism are visible in O'Connor's explanation of the climax:

remember that when the nun hugged the child, the crucifix on her belt was mashed into the side of the child's face, so that one accepted embrace was marked with the ultimate all-inclusive symbol of love, and that when the child saw the sun again, it was a red ball, like an elevated Host drenched in blood and it left a line like a red clay road in the sky. Now here the martyrdom that she had thought about in a childish way … is shown in the final way that it has to be for us all—an acceptance of the Crucifixtion [sic], Christ's and our own.

(HB, p. 124)

The climactic symbols range from the blatant (the sign of the crucifix mashed into the child's face) to the unbelievable (the implication that the child now perceives the sun as “an elevated Host drenched in blood”). The entire story plods toward the girl's salvation, and this unconvincingly executed climax marks the story's complete transformation from promising satire to ponderous theological tract. One of O'Connor's outspoken critiques of a friend's story also applies to “Temple”: “This ending is too obvious. You can suggest something obvious is going to happen but you cannot have it happen in a story. You can't clobber any reader while he is looking” (HB, p. 202).

The conclusion of “Temple” more believably expresses the spiritual perception of the author than that of her immature protagonist. In fact, the most convincing detail of the story's denouement is the information that the child, in spite of what she supposedly has realized about vile and sacred bodies, looks at the taxidriver from the back seat of the car and observes “three folds of fat in the back of his neck” and notes that “his ears were pointed almost like a pig's” (p. 248). This vignette, however, casts some final doubt on whether the young protagonist's conversion has really taken, obviously not O'Connor's intent.

Eight years after the publication of the story, O'Connor wrote “A,” “Odd about ‘The Temple of the Holy Ghost.’ Nobody notices it. It is never anthologized, never commented upon.” In spite of her astute critical eye toward her own and other people's writing, O'Connor apparently did not realize that in “Temple” her dramatic and her moral senses collide. Her final word on the story suggests that theological message dominates artistic matter: “A few nuns have mentioned it with pleasure, but nobody else besides you” (HB, p. 487).

“The Artificial Nigger” is a better story than “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” but no more successful in dramatizing conversion. Early in her career, O'Connor said, “‘The Artificial Nigger’ is my favorite and probably the best thing I'll ever write” (HB, p. 209), and Martha Foley included it in The Best American Short Stories of 1956, but the story, like “Temple,” is marred by an unconvincing transformation at the climax.

O'Connor struggled with “The Artificial Nigger,” especially its conclusion. She told Ben Griffith in 1955, “I wrote that story a good many times, having a lot of trouble with the end” (HB, p. 78). Another letter written the same year suggests that “The Artificial Nigger” began as a simple account of the adventures of two country bumpkins out of their element in the city but during the course of composition grew into something more: “I suppose ‘The Artificial Nigger’ is my favorite. I have often had the experience of finding myself not as adequate to the situation as I thought I would be, but there turned out to be a great deal more to that story than just that” (HB, p. 101).

O'Connor informed her editor, Robert Giroux, that she had sought advice on the story from Caroline Gordon Tate, a friend whose critical acumen O'Connor greatly respected: “I have conferred with Caroline about the story called ‘The Artificial Nigger,’ and am consequently rewriting it” (HB, p. 73). O'Connor later explained the exact nature of her friend's influence: “I frequently send my stories to Mrs. Tate and she is always telling me that the endings are too flat and that at the end I must gain some altitude and get a larger view. Well the end of ‘The Artificial Nigger’ was a very definite attempt to do that and in those last two paragraphs I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise. I am not sure it is successful” (HB, p. 78).

It is unfortunate that O'Connor raised “The Artificial Nigger” to a theological drama, for up to the ending the story works quite well as a farce. Prior to the wrenching climax, O'Connor presents the protagonist's vanity as more comic than evil. Mr. Head and Nelson, who is more a twin than a grandson, compete to see who can arise the earliest and, like typical hillbillies, are prepared to save face by ignoring the train if it passes them by. (This comic bit also implies that these two supposedly vain characters are accustomed to being slighted.) On the train, when Mr. Head reports of Nelson to a stranger, “That's his first nigger” (p. 255), the impression is of comic ignorance rather than sinful racism. The humorous tone continues as the two bumpkins reverently examine the plumbing in the train toilet and wander underfoot and insulted in the dining-car kitchen. Mr. Head is the stereotype comic innocent. As for Nelson, his “sin” is his inordinate pride in being born in Atlanta and not in the sticks.

When the two get lost in the alien city, O'Connor continues to play it for laughs. In an attempt to wean Nelson from his urban pride, his grandfather makes him stick his head into a sewer, and the motherless Nelson, to Mr. Head's disgust, swoons when a black matriarch calls him “Sugarpie” (p. 262). When Mr. Head stupidly awakens Nelson from his side walk nap by loudly banging a garbage can and the disoriented Nelson streaks off “like a wild maddened pony” (p. 264) and flattens an elderly woman carrying a bag of groceries, the two are figures in a Chaplinesque slapstick, not a divine comedy.

Only when Mr. Head, frightened by the old lady's screaming for the police, denies knowing his grandson a few pages from the end of this long story does it begin to take on religious connotations. From this point, the two characters and O'Connor's attitude toward them change drastically, and “The Artificial Nigger” shifts from a delightful comedy to a ponderous melodrama. The expedient denial of Nelson by his grandfather, whose rejections are as impulsive as his allegiances, supposedly plunges Mr. Head into a despair so deep that “Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been the street” (p. 265).

When Nelson snubs his grandfather in return, we are told in unintentionally mock-heroic terms that

Mr. Head … lost all hope. His face in the waning afternoon light looked ravaged and abandoned. He could feel the boy's steady hate. … He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.

As for Nelson, his mind had frozen around his grandfather's treachery as if he were trying to preserve it intact to present at the final judgment.

(pp. 266-67)

It strains credulity that these two primitives, whose symbiotic relationship is based on outdoing each other, could respond to the street mishap in such profoundly tragic terms. O'Connor's attempt to “gain some altitude and get a larger view” breaks the structural back of the story.

At the climax, Mr. Head's “Oh Gawd I'm lost! Oh hep me Gawd I'm lost!” (p. 267) signifies his humbling new sense of vulnerability and sets the stage for the appearance of the artificial nigger, a symbol which merely adds to the confusion. O'Connor explains the statue's significance in some of her murkiest writing: “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy” (p. 269). Then O'Connor inexplicably shifts from the newly sensitized Head back to the comically callous one:

He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise. …

Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, “They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one.”

(p. 269)

This remark is reminiscent of Mr. Head's earlier taunt to Nelson, “Yes, this is where you were born—right here with all these niggers” (p. 260). The instinctive racial slur—and the fact that Mr. Head utters it to prove to Nelson that he is still wise—constitutes odd proof that the old man has begun to find salvation through humility.

O'Connor said, “What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro's suffering for us all” (HB, p. 78), and part of the reason for the failure of this symbol may be that O'Connor wasn't totally committed to it. Her letters reveal that she was less than liberal on race, and Sally Fitzgerald, in her introduction to The Habit of Being, apologizes for what she calls this “area of sensibility” which “remained imperfectly developed” in O'Connor (p. xviii). While O'Connor probably was intellectually sincere in her statements about the Negro's redemptive suffering, her emotions may well have been in closer accord with Mr. Head's sarcastic remark. Whatever the case, Head's racial jeer rings true in the context of the story, while O'Connor's enlightened commentary on the artificial nigger as redemptive symbol does not.

O'Connor apparently did not consider Mr. Head's remark a negative indicator, for she follows it with a lengthy editorial explaining, once again, what her redeemed protagonist has learned: “Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again. … He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it” (pp. 269-70). This passage purports to take us inside the old man's mind, but it is O'Connor's perception that we get, not Mr. Head's. The author leaves her simple-minded protagonist with another sophisticated insight, again couched in the pious language O'Connor disliked and usually avoided: “He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise” (p. 270).

The protagonist's conversion experience is so overstated and represents such a departure from the primitive Mr. Head that one is tempted to speculate that it is intended to be bogus, a part of the comedy, and that O'Connor's inflated description of it is meant to suggest as much. Such is not the case, however, for in 1959 O'Connor informed John Hawkes that “Mr. Head's redemption is all laid out inside the story” (HB, p. 350). And in 1962, O'Connor angrily wrote “A” concerning an article in which Melvin J. Friedman had mentioned the story: “I thought it was about as dumb as you could get. Not only did he say nothing happened to Haze and Tarwater, but that nothing happened to Mr. Head and Nelson! … Holy mother” (HB, p. 474). Friedman had described Mr. Head's and Nelson's trip to Atlanta as spiritually unsuccessful,⁶ but he might more accurately have called it unconvincingly successful.

The failure of “The Artificial Nigger” as a theological dramatization is due primarily to the failure of Mr. Head to endure to the end as a believable character. O'Connor said, “Mr. Head is changed by his experience even though he remains Mr. Head” (HB, p. 275), but in one sense he doesn't change enough: his delivering a racial slur at the moment he is supposed to be experiencing a newfound humility marks him as the same rural buffoon we see earlier, and, as O'Connor once said, “you can't just posit a moral moron and expect the reader to have any interest” (HB, p. 199). In another sense, Mr. Head changes too much: the subtle theologian of the ending is too far removed from the primitive rustic of the beginning.

O'Connor once criticized a story Louise Abbott had written by informing her that the protagonist didn't “come off” because “what happens to her, what she realizes, she realizes because the author wants her to, not because it is her character to realize it” (HB, p. 224). This is precisely the problem with “The Artificial Nigger,” and one of its by products is O'Connor's doctrinaire prose at the end.

O'Connor's comic eye and theological mind are better coordinated in “Revelation.” The story, which won first prize in the 1965 O. Henry Awards, was a relatively easy one for O'Connor. She said, “the whole story just sort of happened. … It was one of those rare ones in which every gesture gave me great pleasure in the writing, from Claud pulling up his pants leg to show where the cow kicked him, right on through” (HB, p. 552). This remark stresses the comedy of “Revelation,” but another letter identifies its dual achievement: “Caroline was crazy about my story. She read it to her class and they laughed until they cried or so she reported … she understood it perfectly and thought it was probably the profoundest so far” (HB, pp. 562-63). Funny and profound—the ideal O'Connor blend.

But unlike “The Artificial Nigger,” which is funny most of the way through and profound at the end, “Revelation” interweaves the comic and the serious throughout, each reinforcing the other. It is probably O'Connor's most beautifully visualized story—especially the opening scene in the doctor's waiting room—and O'Connor does play some bits strictly for laughs, such as Claud's rolling “his trouser leg up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble-white calf” (p. 489), a picture she obviously delighted in for its own sake.

However, the waiting room scene also serves to establish the deep-seated vanity of the protagonist. Unlike Mr. Head's racism, which is the unwitting result of his ignorance and backwoods environment, Mrs. Turpin's sense of superiority, which O'Connor reveals by constantly taking us inside her protagonist's mind, has been carefully reasoned out. Not only does she consider herself better than all blacks but most whites as well. In a set piece that is both amusing and revealing, Mrs. Turpin judges the worth of the other women in the waiting room according to the kind of shoes they are wearing. This middle-class matron has footwear-ranking honed to a fine art and is capable of making such subtle distinctions as “She was not white-trash, just common” (p. 491). This kind of smug judgment is not limited to social encounters but is habitual: “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged” (p. 491).

Tension builds steadily during the long opening scene as Mrs. Turpin engages in hypocritical small talk with a “pleasant lady,” whose “red and gray suede shoes” (p. 490) mark her as the only person there worthy of Mrs. Turpin's attention. “Oh, I couldn't do without my good colored friends,” the pleasant lady says, and Mrs. Turpin replies, “There's a heap of things worse than a nigger” (p. 495). The small talk becomes more pointed as Mrs. Turpin and her friend begin to direct clichés at the woman's scowling daughter. “You just can't beat a good disposition” (p. 490), says the pleasant lady. “It never hurt anyone to smile” (p. 499), echoes Mrs. Turpin, O'Connor foreshadows a cataclysmic event by stating, “every time Mrs. Turpin exchanged a look with the lady, she was aware that the ugly girl's peculiar eyes were still on her” (p. 494).

The girl's seething self-control breaks when Mrs. Turpin, overcome by her blessings, gives voice to what she has been thinking: “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ ‘It could have been different!’ For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. ‘Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!’ she cried aloud” (p. 499). At this, the girl slams Human Development, the book she has been reading, into Mrs. Turpin's face. This violent outburst is totally believable in light of the provocation. The girl, in striking Mrs. Turpin, is also attacking her mother, whom O'Connor has depicted as Mrs. Turpin's more refined moral double.

The girl's assault is outrageously funny. It also marks the beginning of a big change in Mrs. Turpin's life: “There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. ‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation” (p. 500). O'Connor once said, “I don't know if anybody can be converted without seeing themselves in a kind of blasting annihilating light” (HB, p. 427), and Mrs. Turpin's complacency is so total that only a direct blow could shake it. Through the girl, symbolically named Mary Grace, O'Connor had to knock Mrs. Turpin silly in order to knock her sane.

Unlike the sudden conversions of “Temple” and “The Artificial Nigger,” however, almost half of “Revelation” is devoted to charting Mrs. Turpin's reluctant progress to salvation. The second part of the story does not keep pace with its rollicking opening, but its psychological realism gives Mrs. Turpin's ultimate redemption a hard-edged credibility. When the protagonist returns home, her first impulse is, quite naturally, to resist the message of grace brought by the girl: “‘I am not,’ she said tearfully, ‘a wart hog. From hell.’ But the denial had no force” (p. 502). Unable to reject the charge, Mrs. Turpin turns to resentment: “The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath” (p. 502). Next she attempts to exorcise the girl's demonic words by confessing them to her black fieldhands:

“She said,” she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath, “that I was an old wart hog from hell.”

There was an astounded silence.

“Where she at?” the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice.

“Lemme see her. I'll kill her!”

“I'll kill her with you!” the other one cried.

“She b'long in the sylum,” the old woman said emphatically. “You the sweetest white lady I know.”

“She pretty too,” the other two said. “Stout as she can be and sweet. Jesus satisfied with her!”

“Deed he is,” the old woman declared.

“Idiots! Mrs. Turpin growled to herself.

(p. 505)

This little scene is both funny and thematically significant. Mrs. Turpin's refusal to accept the phony image of herself as a good woman offered by the blacks is a step toward facing the truth.

Mrs. Turpin's next step is literal. She climbs the hill to the hogpen, apparently considering it the appropriate place to reason out the meaning of being called a wart hog from hell. Once there, Ruby gets right down to business: “What do you send me a message like that for?” she demands. “How am I a hog and me both?” Then she yells, “Go on, call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell” (pp. 506-07). She ends her harangue by hilariously roaring at God, “Who do you think you are?” (p. 507). In this scene, Ruby begins to grow into a sympathetic, even lovable, character. As O'Connor said, “You got to be a very big woman to shout at the Lord across a hogpen” (HB, p. 577). You also got to believe.

God answers Mrs. Turpin by sending her an epiphany which is so unobtrusively presented that at first it seems to be only description: “A tiny truck, Claud's, appeared on the highway, heading rapidly out of sight. Its gears scraped thinly. It looked like a child's toy. At any moment a bigger truck might smash into it and scatter Claud's and the niggers' brains all over the road” (p. 508). The answer to Ruby's question is that God is omnipotent and that Ruby, like all mortals, is an insignificant, vulnerable creature whose life can end at any moment. Her response to this new knowledge is immediate: “Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs” (p. 508).

The story originally ended at this point, but O'Connor decided that “something else was needed” (HB, p. 549). Fortunately, what she added is not a concluding mini-sermon but a supernatural vision which is perfectly in keeping with the seriocomic tone of the story:

A visionary light settled in her eyes … a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those … like herself and Claud. … They were marching behind the others with great dignity. … They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

(p. 508)

This vision demolishes Ruby's earlier neat ranking of people, and its concluding sentence, which could have quotation marks around “virtues,” completes her education by telling her that no one deserves grace and that we receive it only because of God's mysterious mercy. The epiphany takes, and the story ends with Ruby, “her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead” (pp. 508-09), prepared to face a humbler and more demanding life.

Though at least one reader whom O'Connor respected found “Revelation” pessimistic and considered the protagonist evil (HB, p. 554), O'Connor's main worry was that the story would “be taken to be one designed to make fun of Ruby” (HB, p. 552), probably because her weaknesses are so vividly shown. But the great achievement of the protagonist's characterization is that Ruby Turpin retains her humanity to the end and does not, upon receiving grace, turn into an inspirational symbol. At the same time, O'Connor has made her conversion believable by dramatizing it in action and dialogue consistent with both Mrs. Turpin's humorous traits and her serious role in the story. “Revelation” is not only a delightful comedy but a profound dramatization of redemption as well.

The best of this genre, however, is “Parker's Back,” a story that did not come so easily as “Revelation.” O'Connor told a friend, “‘Parker's Back’ is not coming along too well. It is too funny to be as serious as it ought. I have a lot of trouble with getting the right tone” (HB, p. 427). But get the right tone she did. “Parker's Back” ranks with O'Connor's best in its humor, and it may be her most impressive theological statement.

The protagonist of this richly textured story is one of O'Connor's most intriguing creations, the plucky Obadiah Elihue Parker, a backwoods hedonist whose name foretells that he has been claimed by God. Parker's name also foreshadows the particular brand of religion he is destined for. Both Obadiah and Elihu are Old Testament figures. Obadiah, whose name means “the Lord's servant,” was a Hebrew prophet, and Elihu, consistent with the story's theme of suffering, appears in the Book of Job.

In this, her last story, O'Connor comes full circle. Parker, like Hazel Motes of Wise Blood, stumbles into the arms of God by fleeing him. When his bride-to-be coaxes his full name from him, O. E. Parker says, “If you ever call me that aloud, I'll bust your head open” (p. 517). He ranks God with other unpleasant things to be avoided: “Long views depressed Parker. You look out into space like that and you begin to feel as if someone were after you, the navy or the government or religion” (p. 516). Someone, of course, is after Parker, in spite of his being so debauched that he has “an extra sense that told him when there was a woman nearby watching him” (p. 511). O'Connor ultimately makes the conversion of such a hard case credible mainly through the use of one of the most intricate and effective symbols in her fiction.

Parker's tattoos show that the spirit of the pursuing Christ has long abided in Obadiah Elihue's heart. Commenting on the prerequisites for conversion, O'Connor said, “If you're satisfied with what you've got, you're hardly going to look for anything better” (HB, p. 159), and the tattoos simultaneously represent Parker's dissatisfaction with his life and his subliminal desire for spiritual transfiguration. O'Connor charts Parker's journey to redemption in passages which beautifully mesh the secular and the spiritual levels of meaning. The seed of Parker's quest was planted early, when at the age of fourteen he saw a tattooed man at a fair: “Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed” (p. 513). Thus began Parker's progress to the cross, though at the time he did not realize it: “it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed” (p. 513).

Though we see Parker's need as spiritual, he sees it as material. Inspired by the experience at the fair, he begins to get his own tattoos and discovers that they improve his social life: “He found out that the tattoos were attractive to the kind of girls he liked but who had never liked him before” (p. 513). But tattoos cannot fulfill Parker's true need: “A huge dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up. … As the space on the front of him for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew and became general” (p. 514).

The same feeling of emptiness that produces the tattoos attracts Parker to the woman he marries. Parker subconsciously realizes that only suffering can bring meaning to his life, and pain is the common denominator of his colorful tattoos and drab wife. When Parker gets his first tattoo, O'Connor says, “It hurt very little, just enough to make it appear to Parker to be worth doing. This was peculiar too for before he had thought that only what did not hurt was worth doing” (p. 513). Seemingly against his will, the carnal Parker is drawn to a woman who “was forever sniffing up sin” (p. 510): “Parker had no intention of taking any basket of peaches back there but the next day he found himself doing it” (p. 516). Parker finds himself marrying the woman and then remaining with her in the same driven manner: “Every morning he decided he had had enough and would not return that night; every night he returned” (p. 518).

By localizing Parker's painful attraction to this fanatical woman in her eyes, which are “sharp like the points of two icepicks” (p. 510), O'Connor introduces another symbol to bind the story's threads even tighter. From the beginning, stern eyes are associated with the Holy Spirit. At the opening of the story, when the woman attacks Parker with a broom for swearing, she is described as “a giant hawk-eyed angel wielding a hoary weapon” (p. 512). But Parker manages to ignore the message of the eyes until God shouts his mortality to him when he wrecks a tractor and nearly kills himself. From this point on, Parker is in the fold: “He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it” (p. 521).

Parker's first act as a changed man is to get a tattoo of God on the only decent space left vacant. Not surprisingly, the God that Parker wants on his back is not the benevolent “up-to-date” Jesus, but the Old Testament God of Wrath. When he selects a “flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes,” the tattooist prophesies, “That'll cost you plenty” (p. 522). Whatever the price, Parker seems willing to pay, for when the tattoo is completed, “He longed miserably for Sarah Ruth. Her sharp tongue and icepick eyes were the only comfort he could bring to mind” (p. 524), a passage binding tattoos and demanding eyes with pain and redemption.

One last drunken brawl over the new tattoo is required to solidify Parker's transformation. When Parker is irrevocably cast out of his old life, as “Jonah had been cast into the sea,” he sits on the ground, examines his soul, and finally accepts the fact that “The eyes that were now forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed.” Then, as reward for his submission, “he observed that his dissatisfaction was gone” (p. 527).

The new Parker retains enough of his human traits to anticipate (reasonably, it would seem) that his religious-fanatic wife will be pleased by his latest tattoo. This anticipation sets up the story's marvelous seriocomic ending. When Parker returns home and for the first time calls himself by his biblical name, “he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors” (p. 528). Parker's mission seems completed, for his soul has been glorified into the ultimate tattoo he had always sought.

But when Parker enters his house, he discovers that redemption isn't that simple—or that romantic. The eyes come with the tattoo. When he proudly shows Sarah Ruth his new Christ, she calls him an idolator and begins to thrash him with a broom. Parker finally learns the immolating nature of the demands of the all-seeing eyes on his back as he and Christ are crucified together: “He sat there and let her beat him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ” (p. 529). As Sarah Ruth's eyes harden even more into self-righteous hate, Parker's soften into tears, and O'Connor leaves the man “who called himself Obadiah Elihue—leaning against the tree, crying like a baby” (p. 530).

O'Connor has made Parker's transformation from wilful sensualist to humble martyr convincing by her brilliant symbolic use of Parker's tattoos and the everpresent stern eyes. The ironic twist at the end and the fact that Parker, even after he sees the light, never ceases to be his comically driven self save the story from being sentimental or preachy. “Parker's Back” is both touchingly human and theologically profound in its testimony to the terrible price of grace.

O'Connor finished “Parker's Back” at a time when she was often in pain and almost certainly knew she was finally losing her long battle with lupus. The intense suffering of her last weeks may have had some influence on the stern message of “Parker's Back,” but to stress O'Connor's weakened physical condition is to underestimate her mental and spiritual strength, clearly visible in the letters she wrote during this time. To emphasize the influence of O'Connor's illness is also to ignore the fact that the theological point of “Parker's Back” was by no means new for her. As early as 1955, she called her stories “hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism” (HB, p. 90); and in 1956 she said, “I can understand the feeling of pain on going to Communion and it seems a more reliable feeling than joy” (HB, p. 164). Though O'Connor's long-held belief that spiritual commitment has its price, else it would be worthless, may have been deepened by her own suffering, a surer measure of O'Connor's faith is that pain not only failed to blunt her wonderful sense of humor but seems to have sharpened it. For all her theological profundity, the greatest affirmation of O'Connor's life and work may be her obvious delight in the human comedy.

The synthesis of comic genius and religious devotion found in Flannery O'Connor's writing is rare, and in her best stories O'Connor beautifully blends her way of seeing with the spiritual significance of what she saw. Although she realized that “it's almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction” (HB, p. 144), she took on the theme in almost all her stories. In four of them, she subjected herself not only to the challenge of making grace believable but to depicting its immediate effect on her protagonists.

One of these, “Revelation,” is among O'Connor's finest, and “Parker's Back” may be her best. These two stories, both the products of O'Connor's mature art, belie the critical dictum that she grew little as a writer over the course of her abbreviated career. Discounting “Judgement Day,” a revision of one of her M. F. A. pieces, “Revelation” and “Parker's Back” are the last stories O'Connor wrote. In comparison, her earlier attempts to depict conversion—“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” published in 1954, and “The Artificial Nigger,” published in 1955—are inferior indeed.

In 1960, O'Connor told John Hawkes that “the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it” (HB, p. 400), and the relative failure of “Temple” and “The Artificial Nigger” may be laid to O'Connor's abandonment of her instinctively comic vision as the theology of these stories rose to the surface. By the time of “Revelation” and “Parker's Back,” however, O'Connor had gained the confidence to unblinkingly train her comic-ironic eye on humanity, even in the experience of grace. In these stories, who O'Connor was and what she believed truly come together.

Notes

1. Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 275. All further references to this work appear in the text as HB.

2. These seven stories are, in order of publication, “A Circle in the Fire,” “The Displaced Person,” “Good Country People,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Comforts of Home,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” The protagonists of the last five are all intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals, a type O'Connor had little hope for.

3. Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p. 147.

4. “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Mystery and Manners, p. 31.

5. Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 239. All further references to this work appear in the text.

6. The Added Dimension (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1966), p. 12. The article first appeared in The English Journal in 1962.