L.+Magoulas

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Flannery O'Conner: "The Barber" Report by Kaye Lin Kuphal and Lambrini Magoulas

The story "The Barber" unfolds in a small southern town in which a professor, Rayber, is getting a shave from a barber of dissenting political opinion, a most pressing concern given a coming election. Rayber supports Darmon, and the barber supports Hawkson, a politician using the prejudices against blacks to impel himself into a position of power. Rayber initially attempts to ignore the barber’s constant comments about Hawkson’s superiority, but eventually he sinks to the barber’s level and tries to explain his reasons why he supports Darmon. The barber and other people in the barbershop listen to Rayber’s speech, which changes them not at all, and Rayber punches the barber and flees the scene though he did not get his shave.

In “Good Country People,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “The Barber,” the intellectual individual is taken down by the fiercer, baser character. Both are but simple animals, but the elephant—Hulga, Rayber, or the grandmother—sees himself/herself as superior. Mayhap they possess more knowledge and refinement, but the mad unicorn—the bible salesman, the barber, or the Misfit—is the primitive essence of what all entails being an animal, obstinacy in holding to one and the world’s evil and misunderstanding, and so the unicorn easily overtakes the other. One ** theme ** encompassing the three short stories is the triumph of nature over civilization. The ** protagonists ** are polished: The grandmother is a lady, Rayber is a professor, and Hulga is overly educated. The beast of the other characters brings them to folly though, and so they fall from their “higher place.” A mere misfit kills the grandmother of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” despite her appeals to his desire to be a good man. Such a situation is repeated in “Good Country People,” in which Hulga, the woman with the Ph. D. and cynical perspective meets and loses her leg to the bible salesman with an even more cynical idea of how to approach life, to not at all be honest and simply take what suits him. “The Barber” deviates slightly from the other two, for not only does the beast of the barber overwhelm the professor but his own beast; he ends up hitting the barber. All characters are in the small-town South. The South is seen as a concentrated, closed area of supposed hospitality and prying, meddlesome individuals. Nobody can get away from someone else, for people are always meeting with each other. Specific to the stories, when the scene of most importance, the scene of **conflict**, in which theft, murder, or assault occur, arises, the characters are most isolated. Hulga is in the woods with the salesman, and the family is in the woods with the murderer. While Rayber is in a barber shop and so less split from others, he is surrounded by those who are against him, which heightens the sense of emotional solitude from the sympathetic. The **third-person limited point of view** present in all of the aforementioned stories brings to mind the limited perspectives of the characters. The civilized ones see only and are smug in their rectitude and others’ inadequacy, and the feral ones see only their need to fulfill their desires, to mock, to steal, or to kill. When these limited minds meet, misfortune emerges. They do not understand each other, and thus Rayber worsens his relations with his barber, the grandmother does not earn her life from the Misfit, and Hulga is dumb as the bible salesman steals her leg rather than she his innocence.