Dreaming and Waking
Violence in "The Lives of the Dead" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
In Tim O’Brien’s story “The Lives of the Dead” and Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” violence is conspicuously present. O’Connor and O’Brien use violence to develop the stories’ themes of death, redemption—and literature’s ability to preserve and memorialize the dead. For O’Brien, violence serves to establish the tone of the story, which will largely be a rumination about death. He also uses violence to structure the plot and direct it toward his ultimate themes about literature itself. O’Brien builds on the soldiers’ reaction to violence in Vietnam toward his larger discussion of how stories can be used to memorialize the dead. O’Connor’s use of violence, on the other hand, structures the plot from the top-down—it forms the climax of the story and the transforming force for the characters. The story leads up to it. The violent crisis at the end of the story provides the impetus for the redemption of the protagonist, the grandmother.
O’Brien uses violence in setting and plot to set the mood of “The Lives of the Dead.” The first scene in the story is of an American platoon in Vietnam being shot at by a sniper (73), and other instances of blood and gore include the platoon killing an old man in the village by the South China Sea leaving his corpse with only one arm; Ted Lavender getting shot in the head; Curt Lemon getting killed; and a VC nurse being burnt by napalm (73, 76, 80). This war setting and its related violence sets the stage for the central idea of the nearness and finality of death, for violence and warfare above everything, even sickness, remind us of our own mortality. Regarding the airstrike on the village in the first scene, O’Brien writes “For the next half hour we watched the place burn” (73). That one line serves as a microcosm of the combat environment endured by the soldiers. The soldiers watch the wall of fire like the inevitable approach of death itself. The war setting also provides a stark contrast to the rural Minnesota setting which comprises the other half of the story, yet at the same time shading that setting with the darkness of death. This will prove effective in building to the climax of Lisa’s death. The structure and plotting of the story is thus largely defined by this element of violence.
The violence in “The Lives of the Dead” also serves a second important function in the crafting of O’Brien’s exploration of the way in which the dead live on through imagination, memory, and literature. In the midst of the horror of the war, the soldiers learn to cope by treating corpses as though they were alive, shaking their hands or having conversations with them, and making up stories about long-dead comrades. This macabre ritual parallels the act of storytelling itself. Thus, in dealing with violence and its aftermath, the soldiers perpetuate a pseudo-afterlife for their dead comrades and enemies—they put words in their mouths and life in their limbs, albeit artificially. This pseudo-afterlife created by the soldiers serves as the stepping stone to O’Brien’s discussion of the other way the dead live on: through memory and story. As O’Brien writes, “But this too is true: stories can save us … in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (73) by which he means that the dead can be “brought back to life” in the pages of a story, where they once again walk and talk and think and feel. This is the same basic idea behind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.
Unlike O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” begins peacefully but ends with the violent murder of the grandmother and her family. Compared with the realism of the O’Brien story, O’Connor’s use of violence appears unrealistic. In O’Brien’s story, set as it is partly in a warzone and populated largely by soldiers, the reader is prepared for the brutal side of war and even expects it, but in O’Connor’s story, the violence is mostly unexpected—there is no reason to believe that the family road trip, which is the setting of the story, will end in murder. O’Connor uses this idea of unexpected violence in order to slice through appearances and strike at the heart of the moral and spiritual state of her characters. Her interest in the idea of redemption demands this crisis.
At the climax of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” we read, “[The Misfit’s] voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’ ” (481). In this supreme moment of tension, and faced with the threat of imminent injury or death, the grandmother seems to suddenly arrive at an epiphany. She reaches out to the Misfit both literally and figuratively, seeing him for the first time as a fellow human, perhaps even a fellow reject of society. For the first time in the story, she is not thinking of herself. And here O’Connor has employed irony, in that it was the grandmother’s own selfishness that got her into this difficulty to begin with. But O’Connor is also merciful, for the crisis changes the grandmother for the better, or at least hints at such a change. The Misfit recognizes this when he says, a few lines later, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (481). Through the keen perspective of the Misfit, we are brought to reflect on the transformation that occurs in the grandmother during her final moments, when she is facing death.
And this is the critical point for O’Connor: shocking though the violence is, it enables O’Connor to open up her character, to bring about transformation, and to draw her from the petty to the profound. It is as if O’Connor is taking the grandmother and shaking her by the shoulders, and us as readers along with her, trying to wake us from the slumber of the mundane, from the forgetfulness of the mystery and danger of life, from the tyranny of our own self-obsession. It takes the crisis of accident and death to wake up and change a heart like the grandmother’s.
Violence, then, is an important plot device in many great works of literature. Because of its intensity and our visceral reaction to it, it can serve as a spotlight to draw the attention of the reader to the writer’s underlying message. O’Connor uses the shock of unexpected violence to remind us not to lose ourselves in the unimportant, self-centered issues of everyday life, and as an element of characterization through the moments of grace it provides for her protagonist. O’Brien uses the war-torn, violence-filled atmosphere of Vietnam as a symbol of our own mortality and the backdrop for his discussion of death and literature’s ability to preserve and memorialize the dead. These examples show that masters of fiction use suffering caused by violence to reveal and transform character, to draw us out of ourselves, and even to remind us of our own mortality. O’Brien reminds us, “But this too is true: stories can save us” (73), and the statement can apply to his own work as well as that of O’Connor, for the reader who enters the dream of these authors’ stories and reflects upon them may find themselves woken to the possibility of healing and redemption found in the suffering—whether violent or otherwise—of their own life.