Thematic Differences Between A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Not Waving But Drowning

ENC1102
July 24, 2011
Synthesis Essay
There is a dangerous tendency in the analysis of literature to bind writers together by a single shared characteristic. This resides especially in the realms of religion, race, social class, and gender. While these attributes do have the capacity to provide a lens for examining common threads among works of literature, they are certainly not the only and can even prove limiting by lessening the reader’s probability of exploring alternate, less immediate concurrencies. Two twentieth century writers, Flannery O’Connor and Stevie Smith, allow for easy comparisons on the surface: both were women, they died seven years apart, neither were affluent nor living in poverty, and both suffered from deadly diseases of their day (lupus and tuberculosis, respectively). Yet with careful consideration, these similarities hint at a different commonality between the two that goes deeper than gender, social class, or historical location. There exists one tie that is not nearly so superficial but is of great thematic importance: their mutual literary fascination with death. This manifests in noticeably singular ways relating to their respective lives, the differences between short story and poetry, the textual connections, and the authors’ personal religious beliefs, with O’Connor utilizing death as a motif for salvation in the short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and Smith applying it as a device for reflection on her own personal encounters with death in the poem “Not Waving But Drowning.” A proper analysis of these texts requires an introductory discussion of the lives and personal beliefs of the two authors. Stevie Smith was born in 1902 with the name Florence Margaret Smith. At a very young age her father abandoned her and her mother, and at age 7 Stevie contracted tuberculosis. This diagnosis required that she be sent to a sanatorium, a place she resided intermittently for years. This incident seemingly triggered her fascination with death. She died in 1971 of a brain tumor. Born in 1925, Flannery O’Connor’s life was considerably shorter. At 12 years old, her father died of lupus. Ten years after her father’s death, O’Connor was herself diagnosed with lupus, at which point she returned to her family farm where she resided until death. She was brought up a devout Catholic and held the faith in the highest esteem. O’Connor was also raised in the segregated southern United States, but her attitudes dissented from much of those around her. Both her religious beliefs and her disagreement with racial discrimination are very apparent in her writings. O’Connor died at age 39. These differentiations in the lives of O’Connor and Smith aide in the revelation of thematic differences between “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Not Waving But Drowning.” Smith’s understanding of death is based in a bitterness established in the sanitarium in which she spent the developmental years of her youth. This is palpable throughout the poem in her cold, medical description of the event (lines 7 and 8 read “It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way/They said”) in the poem, with only the occasional sentimental expression (“Poor chap, he always loved larking” in line 5), yet even these are contrasted by the distant descriptor lines (a detached “And now he’s dead” follows in line 6) and serve more to establish the wrongfulness of the death than to reflect positively on the life of the victim. Only on two occasions does she break this rule she has created: in line 10, which she has conveniently placed in parenthesis as if to say “this one does not count,” and the final two lines, in which she does a complete thematic reversal in making it known that the drowning was a metaphor for a problem of much larger, life-long scale. This is further emphasized by the alteration in the repetition of the last two lines of the first and third stanzas. In the first stanza, it reads “I was much further out than you thought/and not waving but drowning.” The final two lines of the third stanza say, “I was much too far out all my life/and not waving but drowning.” The selection from the first stanza hints that this is more than just a simple drowning, while the shift in focus from relating it to the singular incident to the entirety of one’s life in the third makes this theme patently apparent. O’Connor, on the other hand, bases her understanding of death in an unmistakably reverential attitude toward life and death imbued in Catholicism, sensitivity steeped in the death of her father, and her trademark sense of humor. Even in writing on death, an acute appreciation and sense of awe are shown toward life. One demonstration of this is found at the short story’s very end. After The Misfit shoots the grandmother, his lackey Bobby Lee shouts with obvious glee, “Some fun!” to which The Misfit responds, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life” (pp. 141-142). This demonstrates impatience with those who view death as casual and common; despite his reputation as a sinner and his history of having killed, The Misfit recognizes that a death is a very notable thing and should not be taken lightly. Immediately before the exchange cited above, The Misfit says, again in response to a comment by Bobby Lee, that “[the grandmother] would have been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (pp. 140). This exposes O’Connor’s feelings on salvation, as in killing the grandmother; The Misfit has made her a good woman by absolving her of a life of sin and pride and taking these negative actions on himself, as Christ did for humankind. These are just a couple examples of many in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in which O’Connor makes known her attitudes toward life and death. One of the most interesting thematic correlations in the two texts draws further connection between the narrator of Smith’s work and O’Connor’s Misfit. In the final two lines of “Not Waving But Drowning,” Smith writes, “I was much too far out all my life/And not waving but drowning.” Eerie echoes of this symbol of life-long drowning exist in dialogue found throughout “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” One of the most glaring examples is found at the end of one of The Misfit’s final monologues. He says to the grandmother that he calls himself The Misfit “because [he] can’t make what all [he] done wrong fit what all [he] gone through in punishment” (pp. 129). Throughout the conversation between The Misfit and the grandmother, The Misfit expresses that he has always felt alienated and disconnected from general society and even indicates a feeling of isolation from the divine. In paragraph 105, he says that “somebody is always after you,” but it does not strike the reader as a positive statement. Six paragraphs later he states that he was “buried alive” when he was sent to the penitentiary. The voice of “Not Waving But Drowning” is a distant, disconnected observer, but the narration occasionally slips into free indirect discourse in the above cited lines as well as the final two lines of the first stanza. When this happens, one almost gets the feeling that the dead man in “Not Waving But Drowning” could be The Misfit or even the grandmother. With a knowledge of each author’s individual history and ideological worldviews, interpretation even shifts to that of personal narrative. The two texts also contain strong religious connotations that are of absolute importance in the conversation surrounding the authors’ respective interests in death. Both poem and story end on seemingly negative terms, but each authors’ religious background underscores a startling thematic difference. Smith identified as an agnostic in life after a childhood of church attendance, although she reportedly stated that she feared a relapse into belief. Several of her works take a mocking attitude toward Christians and Christianity, especially “Our Bog is Dood” (see appendix). She was even once quoted as saying, “If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said ‘No.’” Conversely, O’Connor maintained a very strong set of dogmatic religious beliefs upon which she based much of her writing. In The Living Novel: A Symposium, O’Connor wrote, “I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.” These dissimilar beliefs individually inform an interpretation that takes into account the religious worldviews from which the authors uniquely operated, with O’Connor viewing death as a necessary part of life in the theological Christian tradition and Smith maintaining a more legal-rational definition of death. Another, more obvious difference that is important to note beside a deeper reading and extrapolation of the texts resides in the particularly differing natures of short story and poem as well as the construction of each. The format of “Not Waving But Drowning” is noteworthy for several reasons. It is short and direct, using only three stanzas, a number with strong Judeo-Christian religious connotations. It utilizes repetition in the last two lines of the first and third stanzas. Each stanza is comprised of four lines. The second and fourth line in each stanza end with the same sound. All of these elements establish a composed and collected atmosphere; as described above; it is very thoughtful and verges on clinical in its description of events. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” on the other hand, is not limited by style or format and is allowed to wander. The authors’ choices to write a story or a poem were intentional and this decision plays a key role in the deciphering of each. Such differences ultimately establish “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Not Waving But Drowning” as two singular works that, despite authorial and even topical similarities, are polar opposites that approach a similar subject in markedly dissimilar ways through the authors’ choice of literary genre, personal convictions and textual associations. While both writings are engaging, haunting, and astonishingly well-written, the authors’ own histories, beliefs and biases found their way in the text. It seems unavoidable that such a thing would happen, and it is ultimately for the best. Neither work would make the same impact if it didn’t feel that something was at stake; as if it were, as the expression goes, “a matter of life or death.”