The Life You Save May Be Your Own setting

Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, to Catholic parents. When she was 15, her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, and her father died of lupus a year later. She attended Georgia State College for Women and then, in 1946, the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she got to know other major figures in Southern literature such as Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Lytle. She published her first book, the novel Wise Blood, in 1952. That same year, she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to the family farm in Milledgeville, where she wrote, attended Mass, raised peacocks, and maintained a wide correspondence, including with writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, her first short story collection, was published in 1955. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, followed in 1960. She died in 1964 of complications from lupus. Her last two short story collections, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and The Complete Stories (1971), were published posthumously, with the latter winning the 1972 National Book Award for Fiction.

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Historical Context of The Life You Save May Be Your Own

O’Connor was active between 1945 and 1964, or from approximately the end of World War II to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This was a transformational period for America, politically, socially, and economically. The post-WWII economic boom was largely fueled by the manufacturing industry, which built on earlier models of assembly line labor to create a robust middle class. However, many groups—African Americans, women, rural Americans living far from industrial centers—were left out of the boom. Additionally, people with disabilities had few legal protections. Disabled children were not guaranteed the right to public education until 1975. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which outlawed discrimination based on ability and required public spaces to be accessible, was only passed in 1990. In the mid-20th century, it was not uncommon for children with developmental disabilities to be institutionalized from a young age. These institutions—also called asylums—often had harsh or unsanitary living conditions, and many families would choose not to publicly acknowledge their disabled relative.

Other Books Related to The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Flannery O’Connor is best known as a writer of the Southern Gothic, a regional genre that emerged in the 20th century out of earlier gothic literature, dark romanticism, and Southern humor like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is another example of the Southern Gothic that deals with disabled, deaf-mute characters. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932) are also major works in Southern literature. O’Connor was a great admirer of Faulkner, once saying that “the presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” O’Connor also knew prominent members of the Southern Agrarian movement, including its de facto leader Robert Penn Warren, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his novel All The King’s Men. O’Connor was also heavily influenced by Catholic thought, especially Thomas Aquinas.

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is a short story by the American author Flannery O'Connor. It is one of the 10 stories in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, published in 1955.

Plot summary[edit]

An elderly woman and her daughter sit quietly on their porch at sunset when Mr. Shiftlet comes walking up the road to their farm. Through carefully selected details, O'Connor reveals that the girl is deaf and mute, that the old woman views Shiftlet as 'a tramp,' and that Shiftlet himself wears a "left coat sleeve that was folded up to show there was only half an arm in it." The old woman's name is Lucynell Crater, and her daughter is also named Lucynell. The two adults exchange curt pleasantries, then Mrs. Crater offers him shelter in exchange for work but warns, "I can't pay." Shiftlet says he has no interest in money, adding that he believes that most people are too concerned with money. Sensing not only a handyman but a suitor for her daughter, Mrs. Crater asks if Shiftlet is married, to which he responds, "Lady, where would you find you an innocent woman today?" Mrs. Crater then makes known her love for her daughter, adding, "She can sweep the floors, cook, wash, feed the chickens, and hoe." Mrs. Crater is clearly offering her daughter's hand to Shiftlet. For the moment, however, he simply decides to stay on the farm and to sleep in the broken-down car. Once Shiftlet moves into the Craters' farm, he fixes a broken fence and hog pen, teaches Lucynell how to speak her first word ("bird"—a recurring symbol in O'Connor's fiction), and, most importantly, repairs the automobile. At this time Mrs. Crater gives her daughter's hand in marriage over to Mr. Shiftlet, but he declines saying, "I can't get married right now, everything you want to do takes money and I ain't got any."

Mrs. Crater, in her desperation to marry off her daughter, offers him a sum of money to marry Lucynell. He then accepts and agrees to marry her. Soon after, the three take the car into town and Lucynell and Shiftlet are married. After the wedding Shiftlet and Lucynell go on their honeymoon. They stop in a restaurant and have dinner. There Lucynell falls asleep. Once she is sound asleep on the counter of the diner, Shiftlet gets up out of his seat and begins to leave. The boy behind the counter looks at the girl and then back at Shiftlet in a confused manner. Seeing how beautiful Lucynell is, the boy exclaims, "She looks like an angel of Gawd". Shiftlet then replies "Hitchhiker" and abandons her at the restaurant. Afterwards Shiftlet "was more depressed than ever" and he "kept his eye out for a hitchhiker." As a storm is breaking in the sky, Shiftlet sees a road sign that reads, "Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own." Shiftlet then offers a ride to a boy who did not even have his thumb out.

Shiftlet tries to make conversation, telling stories about his sweet mother, who is—as the boy at the diner called Lucynell—"an angel of Gawd." But the boy rejects Shiftlet's moral. "My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking polecat," he snaps, before leaping from the car. Shocked, Shiftlet "felt the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him," exclaiming, "Oh Lord! Break forth and wash the slime from the earth!" The rain finally breaks, with a "guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car." Shiftlet speeds off to Mobile, Alabama.

As in several other O'Connor stories, such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People," in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" a malevolent stranger intrudes upon the lives of a family with destructive consequences. Tom Shiftlet has been compared to The Misfit in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"; however, Shiftlet remains primarily a comic character and does not embody The Misfit's spiritual dimensions.

Adaptation[edit]

In 1957, the story was adapted into a television production on the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, starring Gene Kelly.

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