The Facade of Tattoos Essay examples -- essays research papers

The Facade of Tattoos     In "Parkers Back" by Flannery OConnor, the tattoos O.E. Parker receives argon crucial to the reviewers understanding of him. Furthermore, OConnor suggests them as major symbols throughout Parkers life. Parker, the main char exertioner in this report card, goes through the actions of life without in truth knowing who he is and why he is on the earth. Parker gradually experiences religious conversion and, though tattooed all all over the front of his body, is cadaverous to having a Byzantine tattoo of saviour placed on his back, OConnor was using unusual symbols to convey her sense of the mystery of Gods redemptive authority (Shackelford, p 1800). Because of the tattoos, the reader is able to see OConnor come apart the major characteristics in Parkers life and sympathize with this man as he searches for his identity and finds God.      first-class honours degree of all, in order to understand OConnors short story, the reader must look into the accentuate of her life. Parkers Back was the last story written by OConnor before she died at the early jump on of thirty-nine from the disease of Lupus. Her writings all reflect from her religious background of Catholicism. OConnor wrote brilliant stories that brought the issue of religious faith into clear spectacular focus. She was a devout Roman Catholic living in preponderantly Protestant rural Georgia. Her stories are far from pious in fact, their method is usually shocking and often bizarre. Yet the religious issues they raise are central to her work (Drake, online vertical file--------------------------------). Time and again in her stories, the spokesmen for a self-satisfied secularism run afoul of representatives of... the God-haunted protagoniststhey play an indispensable rolethey act as spiritual catalysts(CLC, p276.). To even the casual reader it would appear that fly the coop OConnor really had only one story to tell and really only one main character. This principal character is, of course, Jesus Christ and her one story is mans absolutely crucial accept with Him (Drake, p273).Being a devout Catholic, OConnors faith consciously informed her fiction. The difficulty of her work, she explainedis that many of her readers do non understand the redemptive quality of grace, and, she added, dont recognize it when they see it. All my stories are... ... this flesh OConnor graphically conveys the suffering of Christ incarnate in humanity, and expresses her whimsey that convergence with Christ means union with Christs suffering, not escape from suffering into some abstract realm of spiritual pleasureemphasizing that the rising in consciousness that precedes true convergence is show not through external power or dominance over others but, paradoxically, in a descent into vulnerability, into suffering, into weakness, into mans essential destitution (CLC p 159). It is in this last scene that the reader be comes sympathetic with Obadiah Elihue, having been control out of the house by his harridan wife, leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.      Through the descriptions of Parkers tattoos, one can make connections between the "pictures" he has "drawn all over him" and what goes on in his actual life. OConnor uses the tattoo symbols to reveal the growth of the protagonist, for it takes him years to get past his outer image of his body, to canvass his own soul. One begins to sympathize with this man, "Obadiah Elihue," as he searches for himself and finds peace with God.