Secrets In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees Lily Owens is seeking to find the truth behind her mother Deborah Owens’s death. Since her mother’s death Lily’s life is incomplete, she hears stories from her father (who she calls T-Ray) about her mother but does not believe them. She has been living with guilt since that one night after killing her mother. T-Ray tells Lily that her mother ran away and left her behind, Lily believes he is just saying to punish her, and does not believe what he says. She says, “What if my mother leaving wasn’t true?
Lily also lives with her father and she says in the book that it never felt right to call him dad so she just settled on T. Ray. T. Ray is abusive and convinces Lily that her mother’s death is all her fault by telling her that she picked up the gun and it went off in her hands and killed her mother and that her mother didn’t care about her at all and left her. The date is 1964 and President Johnson has just signed the Civil Rights Act. Rosaleen decides that she wants to register to vote and Lily walks with her into town. As they reach the outskirts of town Rosaleen and Lily come across three white men who harass Rosaleen.
The grandmother reads in the newspaper about a convicted killer, The Misfit, who has escaped from the Federal Pen, and is headed towards Florida. She seizes her opportunity, and points out to Bailey of the breaking news. Her son is easily persuaded by his mother and plans are changed to have the family vacation in east Tennessee. There are times when we opt to be deceitful to others in hopes of protecting a self-image that has been created by our own lies; as a result, we only cause excruciating pain or harm to those who surround us. Unfortunately, the grandmother is not able to see the damage that she causes by her character.
She manipulates her son by giving him a newspaper and Grandmother says, “’The Misfit is a loose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people’” (O’Conner 420). The family was set on going to Florida, but Grandma wanted to go to Tennessee to see friends. O’Conner stated, “The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind” (420). The grandmother wanted to go and see her friends in Tennessee instead of Florida, which is where the family wanted to go.
A Good Man is Hard to Find describes the murder of a family with peculiar members by a band of criminals led by The Misfit. The story relates to religion as a form of salvation used by the grandmother as her last chance to save a life lived with the wrong moral values. There is a contrast of opinions in what ways a man can be describe as good or evil and how the social status can affect such definitions. The use of Christianity is visible the end of the story as a mechanism of defense from the grandmother. She thought that maybe if she looked like a good Christian, The Misfit would have mercy on her.
In Fear and Faith Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is a sense of a “wrong turn” story: a family on a car trip attempts to find the childhood home or their matriarch, a seemingly senile old woman, becomes lost and comes to a very horrible end. Readers are astonished by the way the story ends brutally. The Grandmother tells “The Misfit” “Why you’re one of my own children” and touches him on the shoulder. This triggers a kind of automatic horror and shoots her three times. After his partners in crime returns from killing the other family members, he tells them that the Grandmother “would have been a good woman” had there been somebody there “to shoot her every minute of her life.” The two details- the Grandmother’s words to the misfit and his sudden
Foreshadowing, imagery and symbolism in William Faulkner “A Rose for Emily” “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner starts with Emily’s funeral where the entire town is present “the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument the women mostly out of curiosity” (287). The narrator, who represents the town, describes her life as lonely, hopeless and isolated form the community. Her father robbed her of a life. He is the dominant face in her life and he “had driven away” “all the young men “that wanted to marry her (290). He died when she was thirty years old living her alone with no husband and with a lone to the town.
The story begins with the grandmother trying to persuade the family not to travel towards Florida but perhaps go to Tennessee instead. This is based on the grounds that "The Misfit", an escaped criminal is on the loose somewhere in Florida. The ironic part of this is that the grandmother is the only family member to conjure up, bad things happening to the family. She bases this solely on the fact that they were traveling in the same direction as “The Misfit”. This negative thinking quite possibly could have led to the ultimate rendezvous between the convict and the family.
Firstly Arthur see’s the ghost of Jennet Humphrey at El Marsh House which results in the death of a child; in Arthur’s case it’s his future son which will change his life forever. “He lay crumbled on the grass below it, dead” Susan Hill, the writer uses a theme of revenge here, after the woman in black’s child died in front of her own eyes she wanted to take revenge on everyone else, so whenever someone saw her, a child died. “I had seen the ghost of Jennet Humphrey and she has had her revenge” Susan Hill, the writer also uses the technique of sympathy for both characters; the woman in black and Arthur. We do not feel sympathy for the woman in black as she has murdered and haunted people for years whereas we feel sympathy for Arthur as he was a nice kind man trying to do
The District Attorney then proceeds to tell this author that the gang stated “we murdered him because we couldn’t find her. We wanted to draw her down here to kill her for putting away our homies.” Against the district attorney’s advice this author goes to the funeral under protection because she just has to be there to bury her fiancée. Nothing significant happens during the funeral and this author was taken back to her hotel room. The funeral occurred on Saturday and this author was to stay until Sunday evening for a group debriefing. Once back in her room this author got scared and decided to run.