Background of the author
Class Discussion Questions:
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
1. How do you respond to the ending of this story? Is it a proper ending? What do you think motivated O'Connor to end the story with so little resolution, or is there resolution?
2. How does the ending change the otherwise simple sequence of events in the story? How does O'Connor create the added layers of complexity?
3. Besides not knowing what will happen next, how would you characterize the mysterious quality of this story? WHERE does O'Connor place the mystery; in other words, where does O'Connor expect us to find the mystery?
4. What do we experience in reading this story, even if we cannot "figure out" what it definitely means? Look beyond frustration here. What is the ethical benefit of our being perplexed? Think of what Tom T. Shiftlet says about the heart surgeon: "Why, if he was to take that knife and cut into every corner of it, he still wouldn't know no more than you or me. What you want to bet?" (438).
"Good Country People"
1. At the beginning of "Good Country People," the narrator describes Mrs. Freeman like a vehicle that travels down the road: "Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it." Is this how O'Connor wants us to read her story? What does it mean to follow a "yellow line down the center of it"?
2. Where in the narrative do the primary events of this story actually first emerge in the telling? Why such a long build-up?
3. What are the afflictions in this story? In what way does Joy-Hulga's particular affliction(s) actually create the violent situation through which she might be healed?
4. What is an epiphany? Where does the epiphany occur in this story? What type of irony is used in a story when an epiphany occurs?
5. "True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind." Whose thought is this? How might the reader be the one with an inferior mind?
