Greenleaf by Flannery O'Connor

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Greenleaf by Flannery O'Connor

In her story, “Greenleaf”, the author Flannery O’Conner shows us that people can sometimes blind their factual vision of the world through a mask of dreams, so that they would not be able to make a distinction between reality and their dreams of reality. O’Conner unveils this through the use of point of view , character, irony, and

symbol.

Being told through the limited omniscient point of view, this story takes place on a dairy farm, which was the only thing left to Mrs. May when her husband died. Mrs. May is a strong willed mother of two, who has many dreams and goals. She is “barely making ends meet”, as quoted from the story, through her dairy farm selling her milk. She lives at the farm, since that is the only thing she has, with her two sons Wesley, the younger child, and Scofield.

Though Mrs. May was struggling, her two boys never helped or even supported her. They just lived with her and complained aboutit. Both of the boys have a career of their own. Wesley is described as a thin, bald, intellectual who did not like anything. He drove twenty miles everyday to a second-rate university where he taught, which he did not like. Now his brother Scofield is the total opposite of Wesley, it is

said that the only thing they did have in common was neither cared about what happened to the farm. Scofield was a business man, he sold insurance, not just any insurance but he sold insurance that only Negroes bought. He was known a...

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