Revelation by Flannery O'Connor

Revelation by Flannery O'Connor

The story opens with Ruby Turpin entering a doctor's waiting room with her husband

Claud who has been kicked by a cow. As she and Claud wait, she takes hard stock of the

other people in the room. There was some white-trash, a "red- headed youngish woman"

who was not white-trash, just common, a well-dressed, pleasant looking lady, and her

daughter, an ill-mannered ugly girl in Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks who was reading

a book titled Human Development. Listening to the Gospel song playing on the radio in the

background, Mrs. Turpin's "heart rose. [Jesus] had not made her a nigger or white-trash or

ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she

said. Thank you thank you thank you!"

A few moments later, agreeing with the pleasant lady in regard to her ugly tempered

daughter that "'It never hurt anyone to smile,'" Mrs. Turpin notes,

"If it's one thing I am, . . .it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been

beside myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition

besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the

way it is!' . . .'Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!' she cried aloud."

Suddenly the book Human Development "struck her directly over her left eye." Nurse,

doctor, and mother scramble to subdue the ugly girl. Transfixed by the girl's eyes focused

on her, Mrs. Turpin asks "'What you got to say to me?'" waiting, as O'Connor says "as for a

revelation." "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog" [the girl] whispered."

Haunted by this command, Ruby Turpin spends the rest of the day in puzzlement and

co...

... middle of paper ...

...velation" can help

students understand the nature of Original Sin and the inscrutable nature of God's wisdom,

the "A Good Man is Hard to Find" can certainly help them see both the frailty of human will

and the kindred nature of human existence. Like Ruby Turpin, the grandmother of "A Good

Man Is Hard to Find" considers herself a lady. Dressing for her road trip to Florida with her

son Bailey, his wife, and their three children, she carries her white cotton gloves and pins

"a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet to her neckline"; as her interior

monologue tells us, "In case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway would

know at once that she was a lady." And the thought is grimly prophetic. Badgered into

traveling down a rutted dirt road that the grandmother mistakenly thinks will lead to an

old plantation, they do have an accident.