The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Style)

Style

Point of View

O’Connor employs a detached yet observant third-person narrative in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Shiftlet is a stranger without a fixed identity who wanders into the Craters’s lives. He soon moves in with them and takes an interest first in the Craters’s automobile and then in Lucynell, Mrs. Crater’s mute daughter. Shiftlet and Lucynell are married, but he abandons her at a roadside diner.

While Shiftlet clearly emerges as the central character, O’Connor offers enough glimpses into both his and Mrs. Crater’s psyche to provide insight into their motivations. For example, the reader learns that Shiftlet “always wanted an automobile but he had never been able to afford one before.” This passage, late in the story, confirms his desire for the automobile and the importance he places on money and material goods. Furthermore, O’Connor includes careful details in several descriptive passages which establish the natural world as an important aspect of the story. The reader might not perceive such details if the story were narrated from the point of view of one its characters.

The characters’ dialogue works in tandem with her descriptive passages to reveal their moral emptiness. For example, the cold, abrupt way that Mrs. Crater responds to Shiftlet’s elaborate soliloquies on sunsets and innocent women suggests that she intends to land Shiftlet as a husband for Lucynell. Readers may note that the initial discussion between Shiftlet and Mrs. Crater is odd, even unrealistic, moving casually from philosophy to human nature to the weather. Such jarring dialogue should be read closely because it reveals aspects of both characters’ personalities. It also suggests a certain fantastic quality that is consistent with much of O’Connor’s fiction and elevates her stories above a fixed time and place, giving them a mythic timelessness.

O’Connor’s reserved tone also plays a part in achieving this quality. Rarely does she intrude into the narration, pointing the reader neither in one way nor the other. O’Connor’s subtle tone requires the reader to pay close attention to the details that she provides. Given O’Connor’s detached narrative point of view, when a disturbing line like “The world is almost rotten,” is spoken by Shiftlet, readers should assume that this is more than just a casual observation.

Setting

O’Connor’s short fiction is steeped in the culture of the American South, and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is no exception. The landscape — rural farmland that is seemingly isolated from “the real world” — heightens the timelessness, or disconnection from a specific time or era, of O’Connor’s fiction. The Craters and Shiftlet make a quick appearance in the nearby town so that Lucynell and Shiftlet can be married, and the only other setting used in this story is the highway, where the newlyweds stop at a roadside diner.

Setting is important in one key area: the character’s voices. They speak with a fairly strong Southern dialect, using local slang and occasionally broken English. The effect, however, can be disturbing, since such important issues are often discussed using this seemingly flawed language. “There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife and cut the human heart. . . out of a man’s chest and held it in his hand,” Shiftlet says at one point, “and studied it like a day old chicken, and lady . . . he don’t know no more about it than you or me.” This odd, powerful imagery is made stronger because it is revealed using such language.

Symbols and Imagery

O’Connor uses symbols and imagery to significant effect in this story. Some recurring images and symbols include Christ, nature, physical ailments, and the automobile. When the reader is first introduced to the protagonist, for example, Shiftlet forms “a crooked cross” against the sky. He is also a carpenter. Thus, he appears to be a Christ figure, but since he has only one arm, it may be that he is a flawed Christ. Indeed, all three characters are physically disabled: Shiftlet is without an arm, Mrs. Crater is without teeth, and Lucynell is unable to speak. All of these physical features may reflect the difficulties of the human condition, which is made worse by both Shiftlet’s and Mrs. Crater’s refusal to embrace Lucynell, the manifestation of God’s grace (or “angel of Gawd,” as she is called) in the story.

Nature is perhaps the most pervasive symbol in this story. It is used as both a positive contrast to the crass materialism of Shiftlet and Mrs. Crater and as a negative foreshadowing technique. For example, after Shiftlet chooses to pursue his greed, the tone of the story grows darker. Both nature and Lucynell, who is closely linked with nature in the story, are depicted as victims of the automobile which Shiftlet resurrects.