The Life You Save May Be Your Own
by Lillian Bonar
Essay: The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Pages: 11
Rating: 3 stars
Download Links:
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What if you were given a chance to start over and do things differently? To make up for your mistakes, right your
wrongs? This idea is featured as a theme in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”,
published in the 1953 Spring issue of The Kenyon Review (Kenyon College). The story is about a homeless man by
the name of “Shiftlet” who approaches an isolated, run-down farm where “Mrs.Crater” and her mentally retarded
daughter “Lucynell” lives. Crater offers Shiftlet a home to stay in if he’d do some fix-up jobs around the place,
mainly on the car he’s been eyeing. As the story progresses, Crater sees that Lucynell has an affection towards
Shiftlet and tries to get him to marry her. Shiftlet does marry her because he is offered honeymoon money and
the car. However, during the honeymoon, Shiftlet abandons Lucynell at some diner on the highway. As he heads
towards his destination, “Mobile”, he pikes up a young hitchhiker and begins lecturing him about morals. The
hitchhiker becomes enraged and jumps out of the car, leaving Shiftlet to ask God to "break forth and wash the
slime from this earth" (O’Connor). The short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” can best be analyzed by
looking into Flannery O’Connor’s background, the time period the story was published, the theme, and the irony
and symbolism used in the story.
The idea for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” can be found by looking into the literary movement of that era,
Christian realism. Christian realism was developed by Reinhold Niebuhr in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The idea
of Christian Realism is heaven can not be achieved by those on Earth because the human nature is corrupt and
morally flawed (Niebuhr). O’Connor highlights that heave...