Conflict In Parker's Back By Flannery O Connor

Who can dare say they have never encountered a conflict? No one is without conflict; there will never be a person who says they have never faced a problem. What is a conflict? Most think an opposition or a struggle of some nature. It can be that and more, to state it simply its man vs. anything; that anything can be nature, God, self, and even fellow man. Many of these can be observed in Parker’s Back written by Flannery O’Connor. Parker’s Back is a short story about a man named O.E. Parker who is obsessed with tattoos; the irony is he marries a religious woman who loathes tattoos. In Parker’s Back there are three types of conflict that appear man vs. man, man vs. self, and man vs. God.
Man vs. Man is a conflict that can be seen throughout

self which is parker vs. himself. For example, amid the first stages of the story, O.E. begins to wonder which impulse had caused him to marry and remain with his wife; his temporary conclusion: feeling puzzled and ashamed. “Marriage did not change Sarah Ruth a jot and it made Parker gloomier than ever. Every morning he decided he had had enough and would not return that night; every night he returned. Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo, but the only surface left on him now was his back”( O’Connor 5). The quotation shows one of Parker’s internal struggle against himself; one that the audience can notice from the beginning to the conclusion of the story. Another, example would be at the part when Sarah asks what the O.E. means. First he automatically objects to telling her. He thinks about it and realizes that the only people to know it are the navy, the government, “baptismal record” and his mother. Then he says to her “you’ll go blab it around,” He does in the end tell her what the letters in his name stand for. (O’Connor 4-5) This struggle with himself is not as big as the last one but it still shows that he did not really want to tell her. Man vs. self and man vs. man can have an impact on man vs. God. The conflict man vs. self-shows the internal

God; this particular conflict seems to be hinted throughout the book. For example, when one night Parker’s mother took him to a revival service at church without telling him where they were going; as soon as he realized where he was he pulled away from his mother and left. The very next day he had joined the navy. When the audience reads this a familiar bible story might come to mind. The story would be Jonah; Jonah did not want to do what God had told him to do so he ran away to the sea. The connection is seen by the fact that they both ran away from God and where they ran to, Jonah on a ship going in the complete opposite than what God wanted and Parker to the navy. In addition, after Parker runs his tractor into the tree, he goes straight to the tattoo parlor. In the scholarly journal, "The "All-Demanding Eyes": Following the Old Testament and New Testament Allusions in Flannery O’Connor’s” the author compares Parker to the Bible:
Immediately following the incident, Parker drives straight for the tattoo parlor and, while browsing through a book, passes the Byzantine Christ “with all-demanding eyes” (CW 667). A voice tells him to “go back,” and Parker demands to have the tattoo put on his back (667). Parker with his numinous awareness is responsive to outside forces, much more spiritually attuned than the ardently fundamentalistic Sarah Ruth. This is why Parker “obeyed whatever instinct of this kind had come to him” (672) and steadfastly decided to