The tone of
the story is intimate, focused particularly on the the responses, minute by minute, of the
grandmother to the family's vacation.
While beginning with a comic style (to
hear how audiences who had never heard the story initially responded, you could listen to a
recording of O'Connor reading it aloud), O'Connor uses literary devices such asto make her
scenes come alive. For example, she describes the mother as follows, saying her
face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with
a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears.
O'Connor uses dialogue to lend both a realistic and a comic note to
the story. The dialogue of John Wesley, when he says he'd smack The Misfit's face, foreshadows
how, on a much more serious scale, The Misfit himself deals with conflict (i.e., through
violence).
June's dialogue is punctuated with slang, such as when she says of
her grandmother,
She wouldn't stay at home for a million
bucks.
June also alludes to a popular television show in
which an ordinary housewife is made to feel special (like a queen) when she says the grandmother
wouldn't miss the family vacation even to be queen for a day.
The grandmother
and Red Sammy allude to the United States's policy of giving large amounts of money to rebuild
European nations after World War II when they complain of foreign spending as ruining the
country.
These allusions show the family to be ordinary, parochial, and
unsophisticated middle-class Americans.
One of the most startling turns
O'Connor makes in this story is to take a comic, light-hearted family vacation tale and suddenly
turn it into a grotesque horror story. She underscores this with , such as the grandmother being
in a ditch with The Misfit, that alludes to the Christ storyin this case, the descent into hell.
O'Connor's genius, however, is her ability the meld the horror genre with a story of redemption
and grace.
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