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How Does Flannery O Connor Use Foreshadowing

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Jalissa Sheppard Professor Conway April 7th, 2015 Flannery O'Connor is a writer who is well known for stories like "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own". Although both stories rely on theme and foreshadowing, she uses these elements to paint a larger picture. Her stories can sometimes show violence and or redemption, but there is always a lesson in the end. O'Connor uses theme in order to foreshadow to readers her inevitable endings. In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", a family vacation suddenly ends violently. The family is made up of the Grandmother her son Bailey, and his children John Wesley, June Star, the baby, and also the mother of his children. O'Connor uses clues in devious ways, that doesn't ruin the reader’s thoughts. She uses foreshadowing FOUR major …show more content…

You're one of my own children." (Pg. 302) The Misfit, who is moved by her words, jumps back and shoots her three times. I think O'Connor explains when she writes that, The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her. She gave him a chance at redemption, but he was not accepting of it. The short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is about a man named Shiftlet that walks onto a farm where a Mrs Carter and her disabled daughter Lucyell live. They exchange words and agree that Shiftlet can sleep in her late husbands broke down car and fix things up. He automatically showed great interest in the car, "that car ain't run in fifteen years...the day my husband died it quit running...he judged the car to be about a 1938 or a 29' Ford" . He repairs the car, the fence and the pig pen. Mrs Carter then offers her daughter to Shiftlet, "she's the sweetest girl in the world. I wouldn't give her up for nothing on earth. She's smart too. She can sweep the floor, cook, wash, feed the chicken and hoe. I wouldn't give her up for a casket of

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In the 1953 short story titled “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, readers are given a glimpse of what the end of the story may look like through use of foreshadowing, symbolism, and other literary techniques. Although the story looks to be an innocent story of a family who travels to Florida for vacation at the start of it, readers soon find out that the story has a darker twist to it. This family trip turns violent and this gruesome ending can easily represent the violence taking place in America during the time this story was written by O’Connor and even today. The short story starts off with a family of six- parents, a grandmother, and three children-

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