A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s similes

Let other pens dwell on plot, I’d like to focus on the writing—for now. 

Flannery O’Connor is very different from Alice Munro. Intense. Bang. In-your-face. There’s something cold and pitiless, perhaps even cruel, in Flannery O’Connor.

But if Alice Munro’s prose doesn’t draw attention to itself, Flannery O’Connor’s does, and it is interesting. 

For example, look at this image from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: 

“Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green headkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears.”

Her similes are odd: 

“Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe.”

Very odd. 

“Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.” 

I don’t know what I expected, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, but it went in a direction I didn’t anticipate: the author follows a family going on a little trip and builds it up and lets us get to know the characters, and bang, gives us a shocking, brutal ending. It is even more shocking because of the way she depicts it. 

““You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.” 

This is what I mean when I say Flannery O’Connor is cold and pitiless.

“There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.” 

Who else would describe an old woman—a grandmother—in such a situation as “a parched old turkey hen”? 

“The River” is another story that goes in a direction I didn’t expect. 

“She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton.” 

“She” is Mrs Connin, a babysitter. She takes a little boy of 4 or 5, who is named Harry Ashfield but who lies to her that he’s called Bevel, to spend the day at her house and then at the river, to see a preacher and healer called Bevel Summers. 

“There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from.” 

Flannery O’Connor has a strange way of looking at things. Writers such as Flaubert or Proust or Mishima also come up with unusual metaphors, but there’s something freakish, something grotesque in the way she looks at people.  

“The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.”

The story for the most part feels like an innocent story about a little boy spending a day away from home—what did I think was going to happen?—then at the end, it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. And when it’s over, I needed a little break. 

The third story in the collection is “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”—it is less shocking, but also dark.

“The tramp stood looking at her and didn’t answer. He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.” 

Her writing is good. 

“A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” 

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is not shocking because the author has prepared us.  

“The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree.”

Ominous. 

“In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.”

“A Stroke of Good Fortune” is, I think most people would agree, not a very strong or memorable story. But there are some striking similes in it: 

“She was too tired to take her arms from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the top of the sack.”

That is the main character, Ruby. 

“Standing up straight, she was a short woman, shaped nearly like a funeral urn. She had mulberry-colored hair stacked in sausage rolls around her head but some of these had come loose with the heat and the long walk from the grocery store and pointed frantically in various directions.”

I can’t help thinking that Flannery O’Connor doesn’t like people very much.

“Madam Zoleeda […] had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled.” 

Freakish. 

“She remembered her mother at thirty-four—she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything.”

The apple imagery later reappears:

“She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple…” 

Fascinating writer.