The Life You Save May Be Your Own

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the third story in Flannery O’Connor’s first collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was written in the late fall of 1952. According to biographer Brad Gooch, friend and literary scholar Robert Fitzgerald suggested the story’s title to O’Connor “based on road signs he had seen while driving through the South” (220), road signs that ultimately appear in the story’s conclusion. The story partially reflects some of O’Connor’s feelings regarding her new permanent home at Andalusia due to her deteriorating health. For example, the description of Lucynell Crater and her daughter sitting on the porch of their farmhouse may reflect O’Connor and her mother at Andalusia. Similarly, with her declining health, O’Connor may have sympathized with the one-armed Tom T. Shiftlet, just one of several disabled characters in O’Connor’s stories. Marking her success, O’Connor received the Kenyon Review fiction fellowship of $2,000 in December, and the Kenyon Review published “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” in their spring 1953 issue. The story then received the second prize 1954 O’Henry Award.

Unlike O’Connor’s earlier stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” was adapted for television. The story first appeared on an NBC talk show, Galley Proof, a program that “combined an interview with a leading author and a short dramatization from a forthcoming book” (259). O’Connor appeared on the show in New York City for a discussion about A Good Man Is Hard to Find on May 31, 1955. The discussion introduced the show’s “dramatization of the opening scene of ‘The Life You Save’ performed by three actors in thrift-shop-style costumes” (260-61). Later, O’Connor sold the rights to the story to CBS for a full half-hour television adaptation of the story, which appeared on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars on March 1, 1957. O’Connor commented that the TV producers would “make hash out of my story” (qtd. in Gooch 281), and, when she watched it air, she “dislik[ed] it heartily” (288). Interestingly, during the interview with Galley Proof in 1955, when asked if she would summarize the story, O’Connor replied that she “certainly would not. I don’t think you can paraphrase a story like that. I think there’s only one way to tell it and that's the way it is told in the story” (qtd. in Gooch 261).

The predominant Christian imagery in this story surrounds Shiftlet as a potential Jesus-figure. Parallels between Shiftlet and Jesus accentuate the true crookedness of Shiftlet’s character, a crookedness about which O’Connor ultimately warns readers. In conversation with Joel Wells in May 1962, O’Connor explained that, in Shiftlet, she creates “an itinerant no-good [who] agreed to marry a widow’s idiot daughter to gain title to her car” (Magee 90), automatically underscoring his corrupt character despite his parallels to Jesus. According to scholar Stephen C. Behrendt, O’Connor immediately presents Shiftlet as a multifaceted character when, standing before Lucynell Crater’s farmhouse, “his figure formed a crooked cross” (O’Connor 146), which reveals significance “that has to do both with ‘cross’ (and therefore a whole constellation of Christian signification) and with ‘crooked’ (connoting physical shape but also a sense of dishonesty)” (123). O’Connor builds the Christian significance of Shiftlet’s character throughout the story by paralleling him to Jesus. For example, Shiftlet’s profession as “a carpenter” (O’Connor 148) matches Jesus’s, which Mark 6:1-6 identifies as carpentry (NLT). Then, when talking to the elder Lucynell, Shiftlet notes that “he already knew what was on her mind” (O’Connor 151). The Bible confirms in numerous passages that Jesus knows people's thoughts, such as when the Pharisees, the teachers of religious law, attempt to frame Jesus. For example, when the Pharisees try to accuse Jesus of working on the Sabbath, which defies Jewish law, “Jesus knew their thoughts” (Luke 6.8 NLT) and subsequently confronts them. Additional verses also demonstrate Jesus’s ability to know people's thoughts, such as Matthew 9:4 and 12:25, Mark 2:8, and Luke 5:22 and 11:7.

Shiftlet further parallels Jesus when, at one point, he announces that “there’s some men that some things mean more to them than money” (O’Connor 148), which aligns with Jesus’s warning in Luke 12:15 to “guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own” (NLT). Similarly, Shiftlet sometimes talks in parables, such as in his mini-sermon on the body and the spirit, where he explains that “the body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move” (O’Connor 152). Shiftlet narrates another parable on the importance of mothers when he says that “it’s nothing so sweet as a boy’s mother. She taught him his first prayers at her knee, she give him love when no other would, she told him what was right and what wasn’t” (155). Shiftlet’s telling of parables echoes Jesus’s use of parables in his ministry, which he explains by telling the disciples that “to those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge” (Matt. 13.12 NLT). Finally, while sitting in the driver’s seat of Lucynell’s car, Shiftlet “had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead” (O’Connor 151), immediately conjuring notable images of Jesus raising Lazarus (John 11.1-44) and the son of a widow (Luke 7.11-17) from the dead. Through his language and characterization, O’Connor selects major features to parallel between Shiftlet and Jesus, thus creating in Shiftlet a potential Jesus-figure.

However, O’Connor uses Shiftlet as a Jesus-figure to accentuate the true ugliness of his character, which fulfills the double meaning of Shiftlet as a “crooked cross” that Behrendt explains, ultimately defining the reprehensible characteristics against which O’Connor’s warns readers. Once Shiftlet realizes his crookedness at the end of the story, preceding parallels between Shiftlet and Jesus ultimately accentuate the detriment of Shiftlet’s crookedness. Once Shiftlet abandons the young Lucynell, his new wife, at a diner, he notices road signs while driving away “that warned: ‘Drive carefully: The life you save may be your own’” (O’Connor 155). Scholar Margaret Earley Whitt interprets Shiftlet’s interpretation of the sign as indicating that his “life is morally bankrupt and in order to save himself, he indeed must drive carefully” (53). Therefore, after the young boy who gets into Shiftlet’s car insults Shiftlet for lecturing him and then flees, Shiftlet feels “that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. He raised his arm and let it fall again to his breast. ‘Oh Lord!’ he prayed. ‘Break forth and wash the slime from the earth!’” (O’Connor 156). Here, Shiftlet’s exclamation marks his ultimate discovery of the detriment of his crooked character.

Based on Shiftlet’s exclamation, Whitt claims that “what O’Connor suggests Shiftlet now knows is that he is the subject of his own” (55) exclaimed prayer, thus solidifying at the end of the story that Shiftlet recognizes his crookedness, accentuated by preliminary parallels drawn between Jesus and Shiftlet. Shiftlet’s words echo the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis, where God says that he “will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing” (Gen. 6.7 NLT), subsequently destroying the earth with a flood. Similarities between Shiftlet’s exclaimed prayer and God’s observation of “the extent of human wickedness on the earth” (Gen. 6.5 NLT) that leads to the flood further support that Shiftlet recognizes himself as crooked in the story’s end. Ultimately, O’Connor uses Shiftlet’s realization to warn readers against deceptive characteristics such as Shiftlet’s. For instance, the disciple John explains that “when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3.8 NLT). As a result, Shiftlet’s reading of the road sign results in him considering the crookedness of his exploitation of the Crater women and his abandonment of young Lucynell, thereby marking his understanding of his corrupt character. Ultimately, Shiftlet breaks from his parallelism with Jesus once he realizes his crookedness, and the accentuation of his crooked character through similarities with Jesus creates O’Connor’s warning for readers against the distasteful conduct that Shiftlet embodies and that 1 John 3:8 summarizes.

Works Cited

Behrendt, Stephen C. “Partaking of the Sacraments with Blake and O'Connor: A Reading.” Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction, edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede, Mercer UP, 2007, pp. 117-37.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. New York, Little, Brown, 2009.

Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Translated by Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Tyndale House Publishers, 2015.

Magee, Rosemary M., editor. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Jackson, UP of Mississippi, 1987.

O'Connor, Flannery. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 145-56.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O'Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.