Life You Save May Be Your Own Criticism

On this journey, on the road of life, those will meet many different kinds of people. People will find many great individuals out in this big world actually have some kind of a dark side to them. It does not matter how nice they are to your face. At any point, they can turn right around and stab you straight in the back like you never even mattered to them. As one critic says,” Here, relying on her Southern cultural and religious heritage to set the scene, she writes of the innocence and corruption that can coexist within people”. In the story, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” by Flannery O’Connor, she uses characterization, conflict, and theme by explaining that people are not always what they appear to be.
First off, the story shows characterization by representing two of the characters as grotesque individuals and the daughter, Lucynell, as a sweet innocent character. O’Connor shows that people can be very devious and deceitful no matter how great of a person they try to represent themselves as. As Mr. Shiftlet articulates in the story, “Lady… There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife and cut the human heart…out of a man’s chest and held it in his hand,…and studied it…he don’t know no more about it than you or me” (O’Connor 2). In the story, Mr. Shiftlet is saying that

As said by critic, Bonnie Flaig, “This story exemplifies O’Connor’s gift for ironic humor and her ability to capture the natural speech patterns of the inhabitants of her South. As the reader can see throughout the story, not everyone is who they appear to be. Many people put on a fake face in front of strangers so they can have the satisfaction of looking nice or intelligent. In reality, the people who put on a front for other people are usually the exact opposite of how they