Flannery O'Conner is not terribly clear as to why O.E. and
Sarah marry in the short story, "Parker's Back."
Parker's
comment about the marriage is ambiguous:
Parker understood why he had married her—he
couldn't have got her any other way—but he couldn't understand why he stayed with her
now.
We know that when he
pretends to hurt himself fixing his car, she takes his hand and her touch goes through
him like an electric shock:
Her own hand was dry and hot and rough and Parker
felt himself jolted back to life by her
touch.
This statement could
infer that he has felt lifeless to this point—perhaps he feels dead inside and feels
that this woman can bring him back to life: like a resurrection. O.E. does everything he
can think of before they marry to please her. Afterwards, though, he wonders why he
stays. If he isn't looking for salvation, perhaps his original attraction to her is
simply a physical one.
It seems that the couple have little
in common except for their poor, uneducated backgrounds. Extremely different from
Parker, Sarah is a very religious. Maybe he simply represents something of a "bad boy"
and she cannot quite resist to "flirt with the devil." For instance, he believes that
while she says that she hates his tattoos, that she actually
likes them.
He never met a woman who wasn't attracted to [his
tattoos].
The attraction is a
strange one. One critic suggests that perhaps Sarah marries O.E. in order to save
him—and she seems to like him well enough before they wed. Perhaps O.E. needs her,
sensing that she will bring him out of the loneliness in his life and lead him to
salvation. And while Sarah may think she might be able to save his
soul, she is not one to show him flexibility or compassion, berating him on multiple
occasions for the things he does.
In either case, though
there seem to be vaguely potential reasons why each has decided to marry the other, the
relationship is not clearly based upon devotion to, or love for, one
another.
No comments:
Post a Comment