Response 2

In Flannery O’ Connor’s, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” we meet the character Tom T. Shiftlet, a brimming example of someone who was raised in the “old order” and has to make the transition/change into the “new order.” In particular, we see a man who is really struggling with the culture of the “new order.” There are multiple incidences in the story in which Shiftlet reminisces about the days of old, and their superiority over the “new order.” Shiftlet’s resentment of the present, and change in culture is revealed when O’Connor tells us, “…he had fought and bled in the Arm Service of his country and visited every foreign land and that everywhere he had seen people that didn’t care if they did a thing one way or another. He said he hadn’t been raised thataway.” The condition of living in this particular post WWII short story is really more concurrent with how those would have lived in the “old order” (a rural shack/farm). This shows not just Shiftlet’s inability to change with the times, but really all of the characters’ unwillingness. This living condition makes it seem like the new culture in the U.S. has really forgotten about these particular character, and the old order altogether. Shiftlet’s role as a wanderer/(hitchhiker?)/(con man?) shows the despair/loneliness of someone who is struggling with the change form the old order to the new. Shiftlet actually reminds of the main character from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Both characters are WWII vets and wanderers that move from place to place in a “new order” that has no place for them.

 

One concept that we have been discussing this semester is not looking for the black and white “answer” in every reading, and extending that concept from class room, every day life situations. This concept is concurrent with the idea of looking at history/life as always in “moments of flux.” However, it is our very nature to look at the world or a piece of literature, and want to categorize it, so we think we have answers about aspects of life that we do not quite understand. This is particularly true in the way we look at our history. Many of us came in to this class with my own preconceived myths regarding the cold war. When it comes to the cold war we want to look at it in a “good vs. evil/black and white” because it is easier for us to understand it that way. As we read in McMahon, the cold war was actually much more of a murky of a situation. Instead of the notion that the US were the good guys leading the world to freedom, and that the Russians wanted to destroy the world through communism, we see that both countries were just trying to lead the world in this “new order.” From situations like this it is easy to see how the gap between the constant flux nature of the world and the innate desire for humans to categorize (black and white/ bad vs. evil), gives way to historical discourse and myth. And in contrast, how pieces of non-bias literature can help us to understand these “moments of flux.”