Bobby's English Studies Seminar Blog

  In "The River" by Flannery O'Connor, we follow the events of Harry Ashfield who is a young man with a deep faith. Faith and religion are two reoccurring themes throughout "The River" but what particularly interested me was the comparison O'Connor creates between her characters and religious/divine figures. First, O'Connor finds a way to compare or parallel Mr. Connin to Jesus Christ. When we first meet Mr. Connin, Mrs. Connin introduces her mister from afar: "Bevel turned from Mr. Connin to a colored picture over the bed of a man wearing a white sheet. He had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him" (O'Connor 171). Here, O'Connor writes in such an ambiguous way that, initially, I was unsure if the description was of a stained glass portrait of Jesus or of Mr. Connin. I love how O'Connor described Mr. Connin so similarly to images of Jesus to represent that Mr.

     In "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor, a theme of Parker's story is one of dissatisfaction. Parker seems to be dissatisfied with life and, according to Alfred Corn in his essay "An Encounter With O'Connor and 'Parker's Back,'" Parker finds a way to deal with his dissatisfaction: "And yet he is dissatisfied, troubled, and given to a peculiar addiction. He likes to acquire tattoos" (Corn 11). Here, we see that Corn believes Parker's dissatisfaction in life has made him give in to the addiction of getting tattoos. Nonetheless, we see numerous examples of Parker being dissatisfied in the text.      First, we see Parker is dissatisfied with life when discussing how he is satisfied with his tattoos for "about a month" before losing that interest: "A huge dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up" (O'Connor 518). Later, O'C