Flannery O'Connor is a wonderful author: her sentences feel like reading water; they flow perfectly and her word choice is beautiful. While I was reading this work, it struck me that I already knew how it was going to end. I really hate endings like this. I don’t understand how or why writers get off by writing stories that end like that. They’re not in your face sad, they’re not written to make you cry, but they destroy you.
The entire time I’m reading this story I’m siding with Julian, who believes he’s so righteous by being deliberately colorblind it turns out he’s almost as bad as his mother, who’s suffocating in her prejudice. Now, while Julian’s bleakness is depressing it’s starkly contrasted by the mothers adoration and love, which toys with me throughout the entire story- which I’m sure O’Connor set out to do.
It’s a classic tale of the ungrateful child. His mother is wrong to make rude comments and ruder gestures, and in the privacy of a canceled environment it would be appropriate to have these things brought to her attention. But the way he so callously tries to “teach her a lesson” is in so many ways much more wrong than any crime his mother committed.
And the fact that he gets the last word makes me almost hate this story.
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It is a funny situation when the righteousness of a person over whelms the logic or otherwise real empathy they may have had?
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