Love ‘er

by winged thing

Posted to Utterances on 2001-04-28 22:04:00

Parent message is 7239
I think the themes of her stories are deeper than simply a look at life in the south, though. Notice that in most of her stories, the main character builds up some sort of expectation until the end, when that expectation is shattered and the character, as a result, goes through a fundamental change — sometimes they die; other times the change is psychological. I’d have to say A Good Man is Hard to Find is my favorite… the way the grandmother breaks down at the end is fabulous. You see how, at first, she’s absorbed in her own little world where Europe is to blame for humanity’s problems and her family follows her instructions, and then through her own error (taking the wrong turn and then kicking the cat) she puts her family face to face with the Misfit. Then, as the family is killed one by one in the forest, she becomes more and more desperate and alone until she claims that the Misfit is one of her own children. So in a way, the sequence of events pulls her into the reality of the human condition. And jeez, that’s just one minor level that the story works on. It’s good stuff. 🙂

Julie