The Life You Save May Be Your Own (1953). Content and Description

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” appeared in the Kenyon Review in spring 1953, two years before Harcourt, Brace published it in the O’Connor short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. It later appeared in the 1954 O. Henry Prize Stories and was sold to General Electric Playhouse, which performed the piece on February 1, 1956, with Gene Kelly in the role of the con artist (the televised version eliminated the troublesome ending and had the central character return for his bride). In the short story a drifter, Tom T. Shiftlet, appears at sunset on the farm of Mrs. Lucynell Crater, where, after convincing Mrs. Crater that he has noble intentions, he repairs a fence and hog pen; teaches her mute grown daughter, Lucynell, to say her first word (bird); and then fixes a broken-down automobile.

When Mrs. Crater offers him her daughter’s hand in marriage and a sum of money, Shiftlet weds Lucynell, takes her on a road trip, and abandons her at the Hot Spot, a roadside diner. After he drives away, he picks up a hostile hitchhiker, who soon jumps out of the car. Storm clouds appear, and Shiftlet passes a common 1950s highway safety sign reading, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” As “fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops” fall, Shiftlet steps on the gas and races the rain shower to Mobile.

Significantly, the story is framed by two dramatic manifestations of nature: the setting of the Sun and the fury of a thunderstorm. One signals the arrival of Shiftlet; the other signals his speedy flight. Both provide religious imagery. In the first, Mr. Shiftlet looks toward the Sun in a moment of adoration; his figure forms a “crooked cross.” In the second Shiftlet feels that “the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him,” and cries, “Oh Lord! . . . Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” just after a fleeing hitchhiker tells Shiftlet, “You go to the devil.” The central demonic figure of the story, Shiftlet neither displays awareness of nor feels remorse for treating others with malice. Interestingly, as with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor places prophetic, theological language in the mouth of the story’s villain.

Just as the Misfit debates theological issues, so does Mr. Shiftlet comment on the rotten world and the human heart, much like the disillusioned protagonist does in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Shiftlet also ruminates on the nature of the ever-shifting soul, admits to having a “moral intelligence,” raises theological concerns and questions, and, as do the chorus in Antigone and the prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, comments on “what is man.”

As with “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” deals with deception: the mutual games Mrs. Crater and Tom Shiftlet play, one passing off her 30-year-old mentally disabled daughter as 15 or 16, the other conning his way to someone’s money and automobile. They treat Mrs. Crater’s daughter as an object to be bartered and traded. Lucynell is an innocent being, an “angel of Gawd,” something Shiftlet and the waiter in the roadside cafe recognize. She is a potential agent of salvation, an angelic being with “eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck,” one of the many descriptions that compare her with the Virgin Mary. Yet, as with William Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound and the Fury, her presence cannot negate a rotten world in which Shiftlet, despite having his prayers answered and his desires fulfilled, refuses to repent.

The story ends without closure. Unlike “Good Country People,” in which O’Connor shifts perspective after the con man has made off with Joy- Hulga’s wooden leg, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” focuses solely on Shiftlet as he races down the road. After leaving Lucynell at the Hot Spot, he is “more depressed than ever,” a soul in torment. Lonely and filled with an ironic sense of remorse for someone who has just left his mute wife alone at a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere, Shiftlet picks up a hitchhiker because “he felt that a man with a car had a responsibility to others.” As he talks with the hitchhiker, Shiftlet creates an idealized portrait of his mother, one who taught him to pray, loved him, taught him right from wrong, and whom like Lucynell, an “angel of Gawd,” he abandoned.

O’Connor is careful to show that he is a man of reason with a strong moral sense who freely chooses his immoral course. The story’s violent moment of awareness, common in O’Connor’s works, occurs when the hitchhiker responds, “You go to the devil! . . . My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat!” After the hitchhiker jumps out of the car, Mr. Shiftlet reflects and utters an emphatic prayer: “Oh Lord! . . . Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” Ironically, his prayer is answered when storm clouds unleash their fury on him. Then Shiftlet steps on the gas, leaving responsibility and salvation behind.

Although Shiftlet utters a prayer at the end of the story, he, unlike the mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” does not move toward grace. Instead, he speaks truths that resonate with the reader but that he himself neither accepts nor practices. Unable to save even himself, Shiftlet continues to wander lost. He chooses emptiness over fullness, all the while haunted by his need to connect with others, plagued by a profound lack of self-fulfillment. He is literally deformed—he has one short arm—and spiritually bereft, a fallen figure who chooses freedom over responsibility, the road to death over the life that he can save.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. O’Connor’s story is set in the 1950s, a time of materialism in which the automobile became increasingly important. Consider Tom Shiftlet’s obsession with both the automobile and money. Why are these things significant? How does O’Connor’s depiction of the automobile comment on postwar American society?

2. Like William Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound and the Fury, Lucynell Crater has a disability. Although the story does not state it explicitly, her lack of verbal skills, actions, and the narrator’s comment that Shiftlet tips his hat to her “as if she were not in the least way afflicted” suggest that she may be mentally handicapped. Consider O’Connor’s representation of the girl and of Joy-Hulga Hopewell’s disability in “Good Country People.”

From a 21st-century perspective, is O’Connor’s representation of Lucynell charitable? Compare and contrast O’Connor’s and Faulkner’s portrayal of the disabled and how these characters contribute to their works. After you answer this question from a 21st-century perspective, consider it in terms of America in the 1950s. From your knowledge of mid-20th- century America, would you answer the question the same way? With all of this in mind, is it fair to hold authors accountable for the characters they create?

3. Evaluate O’Connor’s descriptions of the natural world in the story. How do these descriptions contribute to the story’s meaning(s)?