The Life You Save May Be Your Own Metaphors
In the story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, O’Connor uses metaphors and symbols to create a situation that begs the question: what would you do for freedom?
To start off with, the old women’s car is a metaphor for Mr. Shiflet’s freedom. This metaphor creates the situation of what Mr. Shiflet is willing to get that car - his freedom. At the beginning of the story when Mr. Shiflet had first shown up at the old women’s house, they began to discuss who they were and started to create a deal with each other. This is when Mr. Shiflet first started to show interest in the car. “Mr. Shiflet’s pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard…and moved to a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile. “You ladies drive?”
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Shiflet “taking” the daughter off of the old woman's hands is a metaphor for the old woman's freedom. In the story, the woman saw her daughter as simply something that was weighing her down and taking away her freedom. When Mr. Shiflet and her had made the deal of him getting the car in exchange for taking her daughter, she had started to cry as they drove away. “When they were ready to leave, she stood staring in the window of the car, with her fingers clenched around the glass. Tears began to seep sideways out of her eyes and run along the dirty creases in her face. “I ain’t ever been parted with her for two days before,” she said,” (O’Connor 11). The old lady knows that her daughter is not going to come back; she is going to die, and she will never see her again. Even though she knows that by Mr.Shiflet taking her away her daughter is going to get killed, she is still willing to send her off because she knows it will grant her freedom. In order to gain her freedom, she is willing to do something she knows is extremely morally wrong and will likely cause her great pain in the future. In society, the population tends to do a lot of things that they know they shouldn’t be doing and are wrong in order to gain something that they want - such as
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