The Narrative of Grace A Jour

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THE NARRATIVE OF GRACE: A JOURNEY TOWARD
CONVERSION IN THE
FICTION
OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR
AND C.S. LEWIS
by
Candice M. Covak
THESIS
Presented to the Faculty of the

College of Arts and Sciences
University of Alaska Anchorage
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH
May 2001
UMI Number: 1407439
Copyright 2002 by
Covak, Candice Marie
All rights reserved.
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THE NARRATIVE OF GRACE: A JOURNEY TOWARD
CONVERSION IN THE
FICTION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR
AND C.S. LEWIS
by
Candice M. Covak
THESIS
APPROVED: Thesis Committee
uau Xoct
Genie
Chair
/ b u.'/ot
Patricia Linton
Will A. Jacobs
ACCEPTED:
Deap, Cojllege of Datte
Arts and Sciences
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my committee members for their
willingness to participate in the reviewing and discussion
of a product as indicative of my spirit as it is of my
writing. I am grateful foremost to my chair, Dr. Genie Babb,
for challenging my ideas and words. I thank Dr. Patricia
Linton for reminding me the exchange of ideas is our most
enriching experience. I am thankful for Dr. Clay Nunnally's

encouragement: he is, indeed, a gifted professor and one
classy gentleman. And, finally, to Dr. Will Jacobs of the
history department I extend my sincere thanks for so
anxiously awaiting my simple thoughts on two authors we both
cherish and admire - your excitement about their work was
contagious.
But, undoubtedly, my highest thanks go to my husband,
Craig, for his immeasurable support and encouragement. The
wisdom and example he so humbly offered allowed me to
continue in this process when I least believed I could: this
thesis belongs as much to him as to me. Of course, above
all, I thank God, from Whom I have received the most
precious gift of all - my grace.
Abstract
The fiction of Flannery O'Connor and C.S. Lewis
provides an opportunity to explore how two different
narrative techniques depict grace as both a process and a
singular, defining moment. Defined as the state of being in
relationship with God that results from a process of
realizing that we are sinners and consciously choosing to
accept God's forgiveness, grace is examined in light of each
author's perspective of it. Each view complements the other
so that, when taken together, they present a rich picture of
the experience of grace. Chapters One and Two pair
O'Connor's short story "Revelation" and Lewis's book The
Great Divorce in a discussion of how parable and myth
underscore the moment of grace. Chapters Three and Four pair
Lewis's The Screwtape Letters and O'Connor's "Parker's
Back" in an examination of how M.M. Bakhtin's theories of
double-voiced discourse and character zones shed light on
the journey toward grace.
i i i
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ........................................ i
Abstract............................................... ii
Introduction......... ................................. 1
Chapter One:
The Parable of Grace in "Revelation" ...........16
Chapter Two:
The Mythic World of Grace in The
Great Divorce................................31
Chapter Three:
A Doublevoicing of Grace in The
Screwtape Le t t e r s........................... 54
Chapter Four:
The Voices of Grace in
"Parker's Back" ........................... 75
Conclusion............................................. 98
Works C i t e d ............................................ 103
introduction
Like so many of our best ideas, the pairing of Flannery

O'Connor and C.S. Lewis came almost accidentally. I began
assembling my thoughts for a thesis around an author whose
work I enjoyed for many reasons, not the least of which were
the encounters with God always found in her stories. Despite
my overall appreciation of her fiction, I found that one
aspect of O'Connor's writing - her appeal to emotions -
tended to leave me perplexed and, at times, distanced from
the work. I considered her characters' emotional encounters
to be moments of grace, but my own notion of grace is not
based entirely on emotions. To me, grace is a decision, and
it is made by employing as much intellect as emotion.
Instantly, my mind connected intellect and grace, and I
thought of C.S. Lewis. After quickly pondering the
connection, I realized that while Lewis's fiction, too,
discusses grace, his approach appeals more to the mind than
it does to the heart. This complement I found between them
was the first in a series that followed, and the focus of my
thesis was the result. Upon further research, I soon found
that their attention to grace was not the only
characteristic they had in common: their personal
backgrounds also revealed additional shared experiences.
Covak 2
Born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, Flannery

O'Connor squeezed her life and career into a mere 39 years
before she died on August 3, 1964, of lupus-related
complications. Raised Roman Catholic in a region of the
South occupied predominantly by Protestants, O'Connor had no
definitive conversion experience that we know of; instead,
as she would later disclose, her life was a series of
conversions, an ongoing process of determining that God is
one who "reveal [s] himself specifically [. . .] who became
man and rose from the dead [. . .] who confounds the senses
and sensibilities'' (O'Connor Mystery 161). Throughout her
life, O'Connor repeatedly expressed her concern that, as a
civilization, the western world - and the United States, in
particular - was increasingly disinterested in engaging this
process; in an address entitled "Novelist and Believer''
delivered at Sweetbriar College, Virginia, in March of 1963,
she declares, "Today's audience is one in which religious
feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and
sentimental" (161). This assessment was, perhaps, the
earliest foundation for her interest in writing. Even as a
girl, she wrote stories centering on human struggle; but it
wasn't until she was awarded a fellowship at the University
of Iowa that she began to hone her writing to focus on
grace. It was not surprising, considering her opinions of
C ovak 3
its interest, that O'Connor chose the genre of the novel to

write what would become her first major critically acclaimed
work of fiction - Wise Blood.
The modern novel is of interest to the theologian,
O'Connor writes, "because there he sees reflected the man
of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling
in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems
of the spirit" (158). Despite O'Connor's relatively small
repertoire of only two novels and two volumes of short
stories, each of her texts, in its own way, speaks to a
particular brand of unbeliever: the intellectual, the
prideful, the idolater, the blasphemer. Her depictions of
protagonists as flawed, sometimes desperate but always
searching unbelievers comment overtly on humanity's own
imperfection and need for the only God she believed could
redeem.it. O'Connor invites us to become a part of the
story: "Some people have the notion that you read the story
and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the
fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning,
because it is an experience, not an abstraction" (73).
Perhaps this proclivity for overlapping the experiences of
hero and reader is why critics of her earliest work remained
fairly aloof, citing as Isaac Rosenfeld of The New Republic
ironically did, "since the hero was plain crazy it was
Covak 4
difficult to take his religious predicament seriously"

(qtd. in Fitzgerald xviii).
It is noteworthy that the majority of critics today, by
centering their discussions on the moment of grace, focus
largely on the same element of O'Connor's work as their
predecessors did roughly forty years ago. Contemporary
critics, especially, are more inclined to focus on the
subject strictly as it exists in the elements of the text
itself, attention O'Connor felt often resulted in an
over-analysis of her work: as she told one English
professor, " ' I think you folks sometimes strain the soup
too thin'" (qtd. in Ragen par. 1). Nevertheless, the most
recent interest remains especially focused on three
elements: the South, the depiction of African-Americans, and
the grotesque. While discussion of the first two has
centered chiefly on the social history that influenced
twentieth century writers, the last has remained a topic of
interest for its textual implications alone. O'Connor's
consistent use of violence to unveil the hidden
monstrosities of her unbelievers serves the dual purpose of
illuminating the grotesque nature of humanity while
signaling the onset of the moment of grace: as O'Connor
explains it, "[. . .] I have found that violence is
strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and
Covak 5
preparing them to accept their moment of grace" (Mystery

11 2 ).
Which brings us to the question of O'Connor's

definition of grace. Certainly, it was first molded by her
Catholic upbringing. The Roman Catholic sense of sin as an
inborn separation from God and its notion of redemption as
God's absolution from that sin provide the most fundamental
elements, of course, because they foreground the need for
grace, which may be defined as a saving act of God
accomplished by Jesus through His death and resurrection
("Roman"). According to Catholic dogma, then, the process
of salvation requires us to first recognize our natural
tendency to sin so that we may then acknowledge our need for
redemption and, consequently, grace which "signifies in
Roman Catholic belief both the love of God and the effect
produced in man by this love" ("Roman"). Moreover, grace
is sustained in the Catholic church by undergoing the seven
sacraments and participating in good works to demonstrate a
true commitment to continually seeking God's forgiveness and
love, both of which we need. These are the characteristics
that comprise my perception of O'Connor's sense of grace.
However, evidenced in her writing is something that
goes beyond this definition. O'Connor's writing displays an
ultimate concern - a central issue that causes us to
C ovak 6
constantly reconsider our religious values and assess our

own standing with God. She expresses this ultimate concern
as " a relationship with a supreme being recognized through
faith11 that finds its root in " t h e experience of an
encounter, of a kind of knowledge which affects the
believer's every action11 (Mystery 160). This encounter is
often conveyed through a moment of grace in O'Connor's
texts. Of course, assertions on what exactly that moment is
vary: some label it as what marks a conversion has taken
place while others view it as a mere turning point in the
story's account of religious awakening. In his essay "The
Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor," Bob
Dowell combines the two, asserting that, at the moment of
grace, O'Connor is writing about her protagonist's
"recognition of the existence of evil, of his own tendency
toward evil, and his ability to triumph over evil through
grace, a supernatural gift from God which comes only with
man's full dependence on Christ1' (238). Her protagonists'
views and responses to God also suggest a basis in
Christianity, and the tension they create leads ultimately
to the moment of grace since:
Miss O'Connor's fiction is primarily concerned
with man's life-and-death spiritual struggle. The
protagonist, rebelling against belief, forces a
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
C ovak 7
crisis that reveals to him his haughty and willful

misconception of reality, at which time he
experiences what Miss O'Connor has called his
"moment of grace." (236)
This passage proposes four components of O'Connor's
rendering of grace: the protagonist's rebellion from belief,
the forced crisis, a revelation of a flawed conception of
reality, and, finally, the moment of grace. Moreover, each
of these components illuminates an aspect of O'Connor's
Catholic sense of grace and each centers on encounters and
experiences — the two features O'Connor emphasizes as
critical to grace. C.S. Lewis, however, takes a different
approach.
While experience is certainly an important aspect of
Lewis's sense of grace, his work reflects a definition that
is rooted more strongly in intellect than in emotion. An
examination of his rendering of grace coupled with the
details of his own conversion reveals another definition of
grace that, despite its slight differences from O'Connor's,
ultimately complements it. Born Clive Staples Lewis on
November 29, 18 98, in Belfast, Ireland, Lewis wrote in the
genres of fiction, critical essays, and non-fiction prose in
the 64 years prior to his death on November 23, 1963. Like
O'Connor, he, too, began writing stories as a child; he even
C ovak 8
water-colored maps and pictures to illustrate them (Mills

259). Both were raised with a denominational influence (both
before and after his conversion, Lewis remained a member of
the Anglican St. Mark's), both address the West's
increasingly detached interest in any supreme being, and
both recognize the necessity of an encounter with God.
However, unlike O'Connor, Lewis had a definite conversion
experience.
Lewis's own journey toward grace is marked by some key
events - both personal and professional. Certainly, no
discussion of his life would be adequate without noting the
importance he placed on education. According to Evan K.
Gibson's book, C.S. Lewis Spinner of Tales: A Guide to His
Fiction, Lewis's involvement in education began with his own
childhood schooling in British public institutions - where
he had as many poor experiences as good - and culminated in
a professorship at Oxford where he largely taught courses in
medieval literature (8). But before his college career would
begin, Lewis entered World War I in 1917, fighting in France
until an injury sent him home in 1918 (Mills 279). The years
following the war were marked as much by staunch atheism as
interest in intellectualism. Ironically, however, these
years are credited by most Lewis scholars as contributing to
his "effectiveness as an apologist or defender of the
Covak 9
faith" since by "knowing the attitudes, the feelings, the

arguments of the skeptic from the inside, he was able to
illustrate [. . .] that the Gospels [. . .] are the truth of
God" (Gibson 10). Lewis " w a s thirty-one when he first
'admitted God was God, and knelt and prayed' [becoming] 'the
most dejected and reluctant convert in all England1" (Mills
261). His admission of his newfound faith was not
accompanied by the great joy many expect; rather, Lewis
found himself willingly accepting - without a great deal of
emotional fanfare - the notion of a God who loves and
forgives as the most sensible version of the many he'd
studied. As Lewis would later confess, " I am an empirical
Theist. I have arrived at God by induction" (gtd. in Nelson
par. 23). From this decision came his prose and poetry that
delights and challenges readers even today.
In fact, one of the reasons for Lewis's wide readership
is his use of multiple genres, from children's literature to
science fiction to literary criticism. His Space Trilogy and
The Chronicles of Narnia series have acguired readerships in
religious and secular arenas while his personal reflections
on religious abstractions of the kind found in The Problem
of Pain and A Grief Observed secure their niche in more
inspirationally oriented audiences. Lewis's earliest
writings - The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image, for
Covak 10
example - are representatives of the critical discourse he

assumed in his role as professor at Oxford. In addition to
operating in multiple genres, Lewis also utilizes a variety
of techniques, including letters and analogies, to appeal to
a broad range of readers. In The Screwtape Letters, for
example, readers observe one character's moral search,
conversion, and subsequent temptation through a series of
correspondences between two devils revealing their efforts
to persuade the narrator to return to a life of hopeless
characterized by a belief in nothing. In Mere Christianity,
Lewis portrays the relationship between man and grace
through a series of analogies that convey the moment as
being "like falling at someone's feet" or " l i k e emerging
from the womb"; "like waking after a long sleep" or "like
taking on board food or. fuel"; and as a "cottage being
made into a palace, or a field being plowed and resown"
(151). But in whatever genre and for whatever audience he
wrote, Lewis found critical and popular approval alike.
Ironically, the central question Lewis applied in his own
criticism has seemingly carried over to critics'
interpretations of his own work: " 'Why and how should we
read this?'" (qtd. in Hart 29). Over time, critics have
suggested a variety of answers ranging from an emphasis on
Covak 11
his early atheism to his later depictions of hell to his

ruminations on grief written shortly before his death.
However, without question, the most often examined
aspect of Lewis's work is his representation of Christianity
and its peculiar brand of grace. While all of his post
conversion writing focuses on grace, it is, surprisingly,
nearly impossible to unearth a clear definition of the term
in his work. This could be because Scripture provided much
of the foundation for his arguments, so intense expansion of

the term seemed superfluous. Or perhaps this is an example
of Lewis's preservation of individual interpretation in
literature meshing with his apologetics. Whatever the case
may be, because Lewis writes about grace in numerous
contexts, clear-cut definitions are not readily available.
Furthermore, because of Lewis's own complex spiritual
journey, it is impractical to trace every event that
contributed to his eventual conversion to Christianity.
Suffice it to say, Lewis's definition of grace was formed
first by the major tenets - both in his time and now - of
the Anglican church, some of which are " t h e affirmation of
human sinfulness and the saving significance of Jesus' death
and resurrection" and " t h e Bible as an authority for
defining Christian truth about God" (Scott par. 4). In his
Covak 12
preface to The Great Divorce, Lewis summarizes a spiritual

journey that culminates in a choice between Heaven and Hell:
We are not living in a world where all roads are
radii of a circle and where all, if followed long
enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and
finally meet at the center: rather in a world
where every road, after a few miles, forks into
two, and each of these into two again, and at each
fork you must make a decision. [. . .] If we
insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall
not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not
be able to retain even the smallest and most
intimate souvenirs of Hell. (9-10)
This description reveals Lewis1s view of salvation as a
process of decision-making ultimately concluding in an
either-or situation that determines our spiritual destiny.
Lewis's reduction of the question of grace to the basic
choice of what we insist upon suggests that, while God
provides the grace and the Heaven we are able to choose, we
bear the greatest burden of responsibility for our own
decision to accept those provisions. Consequently, I suggest
Lewis's definition of grace centers on what becomes of our
decision to accept God and heaven, which we arrive at after
careful consideration of the situations and consequences
Covak 13
that precede and follow it; that is, grace is the state of
being we assume after we determine, by way of our free will,
that the existence of God is the most sensible explanation
for our existence.
Most intriguing to me is not the individual renderings
of grace O'Connor and Lewis provide; of greater
noteworthiness is how, when juxtaposed, their individual
representations complement each other to create a fuller
depiction of the moment of grace and the process leading up
to it. When I read them together, O'Connor's emphasis on
relationship with God and Lewis's revelation of ultimate
choice enable me to discover the fullest version of my own
construction of grace. Each author's view of grace
complements the other so that, taken together, they present
a rich picture of the experience of grace. For the purposes
of this study, I define grace as the state of being in
relationship with God that results from a process of
realizing that we are sinners and consciously choosing to
accept God's forgiveness. I further define grace in terms of
each author's use of genre, narrative structure, and voice
and analyze how each contributes to a unique representation
of grace in the four selected texts from O'Connor and Lewis.
Chapter One examines how the parable in Flannery
O'Connor's short story "Revelation" underscores the moment
Covak 14
of grace through the use of Biblical form and symbolism.

Specifically, I trace the ways in which the protagonist's
moment of grace incorporates symbols from the New Testament
to illustrate her realization of her own grace and of those
around her. Through a detailed inspection of the symbolism
and metaphor in Mrs. Turpin's transformation upon accepting
grace, I explicate both the meanings of these narrative
devices as they compare to their Biblical counterparts and
the nature of their representation of O'Connor's notion of
grace.
Chapter Two complements the first by discussing how the
interpolated narrative of myth in Lewis's The Great Divorce
also illuminates the moment of grace. Analyzing the ways
Lewis restructures readers' expectations through the use of
fantasy, I also investigate how Lewis incorporates
imagination into his rendering of a person's journey through
a mythical city of God. Like " Revelation, !' Divorce also
centers on the presentation of the moment of grace; however,
Lewis first presents a variety of failed moments of grace
before he presents a successful one. Lewis's text enriches a
reader's understanding of what a complete moment is through
this contrast.
Chapter Three focuses on voice through its application
of Bakhtin's theory of double-voiced discourse to Lewis's
Covak 15
The Screwtape Letters. Through a close inspection of the

twofold layers of Screwtape's and Lewis's narration, I shift
my focus from the precise moment of grace to the process of
change that precedes it, taking special care to tease out
the precise way each voice is either representative of or
contributes to Lewis's rendering of grace. Of further
interest is Lewis's peculiar technique of presenting grace
through the voice of a devil, a move that, I suggest, at

once subverts a reader's traditional sense of grace and
prompts her to rethink the consequences of refusing it.
Chapter Four applies the Bakhtinian notion of
doublevoicedness to a discussion of the protagonist's two
competing voices in O'Connor's short story "Parker's
Back." The dialogue between these two voices reveals an
ongoing spiritual battle the victor of which will determine
Parker's spiritual destiny. Additionally, I explore how
Parker's process of change before his moment of grace is
influenced and even advanced by the cruelty of his wife,
Sarah Ruth, whose voice articulates another distinct - and
inherently flawed - perspective on grace.
C ovak 16
CHAPTER 1
The Parable of Grace in “Revelation”
A story whose focus rests on the moment its protagonist

realizes her opportunity for grace, Flannery O'Connor's
"Revelation" employs the form of a parable to create the
interpolated narrative that documents her moment of grace.
Set in a small rural town, the story begins when the
protagonist, Mrs. Turpin, escorts her husband to the
doctor's office. While she waits for him to be examined,
Mrs. Turpin engages other patients in conversation,
discussing, in particular, the various ways " n i g g e r s "
violate the parameters of existence society has placed upon
them. Interestingly, Mrs. Turpin's judgments of
African-Americans' worth and commentary on their usefulness
depict her as being unaware of any offensiveness or
wrongdoing where her opinions are concerned; she seems
confidant that her views reflect an accurate assessment of
the facts. As she is conversing, Mrs. Turpin notices an
"ugly girl," Mary Grace, whose eyes are "fixed like two
drills on Mrs. Turpin" (O'Connor 203). After she speaks to
Mary Grace's mother about the girl's rude behavior, others
also begin to criticize Mary Grace until she hurls a book at
Mrs. Turpin that strikes her in the eye moments before Mary
Grace is on top of her, clawing at her neck. Mary Grace's
C ovak 17
seething whisper, " G o back to hell where you came from, you
old wart hog, '1 is the first link in a chain of events that
cause Mrs. Turpin to reflect on her behavior until, immersed
in confusion and despair, she shouts furiously to God,
"'Who do you think you are?11' (216). The response comes in
the form of a vision that prompts Mrs. Turpin to finally
release her embittered attitudes and accept that all people
are egually important to God.
Mrs. Turpin exemplifies the angry and confused
character who is O'Connor's usual recipient of the moment of
grace. She is, as Arthur F. Kinney describes in his
discussion of characterization in O'Connor's fiction, as
"the most maimed, deformed, or unregenerate of people,
[and] in O'Connor's fictional world God seems to us to spend
his grace on the unlikeliest of people" (71). While Mrs.
Turpin's ignorance of her racial prejudices at first makes
them pitiful, they soon become as disturbing as the
systematic way she categorizes them:
Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at
night naming the classes of people. On the
bottom of the heap were most colored people
[. . .] then next to them [. . .] were the
white-trash; [then] the home-owners [. . .]
Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all
C ovak 18
the classes of people were moiling and

roiling around in her head, and she would
dream they were all crammed in together in a
box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas
oven. (195-96)
Mrs. Turpin's system of ordering assigns no importance to
the groups of people she classifies: her references to
"colored people11 and "white-trash11 only reiterates her
most unattractive features. Indeed, her last comment about a
box car and gas oven implies an association between Mrs.
Turpin's perspective and that of the Nazis and the
concentration camps they operated. Mrs. Turpin's refusal to
see lower-class individuals (such as " t h e Negroes" )as her
equals is another way we are encouraged to perceive her as a
particularly unlikable character: the discrepancy between
her belief in Christianity and her behavior that contradicts
it exposes her as a falsely genuine woman whose declarations
of Christianity are only a racist's facade. Despite all
this, and in accordance with Kinney's assessment, O'Connor
selects the unlovable Mrs. Turpin to be the recipient of
God's grace and constructs around her a parable to
illustrate a change in her behavior. In a form peculiarly
resonant with the New Testament, O'Connor's parable departs
from the events of the frame story to form an interpolated
C ovak 19
narrative complete with its own symbols and images that are
mirrored in the New Testament. This chapter concentrates
first on establishing how this interpolated narrative
functions as a parable and then on the ways in which
O'Connor uses the images and symbols in this parable - and,
by extension, in the New Testament - to communicate Mrs.
Turpin's moment of grace.

Parable Defined
It is first necessary to formulate a precise definition
of parable as it will function in this discussion and to
provide a theoretical basis for my assertion that Mrs.
Turpin's vision does indeed function as a parable. M.H.
Abrams posits, " a parable is a very short narrative about
human beings presented so as to stress the tacit analogy, or
parallel, with a general thesis or lesson that the narrator
is trying to bring home to his audience'' (7). The parable
in "Revelation'' meets these standards: its content spans
only a paragraph and it conveys Mrs. Turpin's lesson of
grace that causes her to realize the equality and
significance of all people. O'Connor's parable also echoes a
New Testament use of the form through a borrowing of some
images and symbols found there. Furthermore, O'Connor's
parable possesses its own plot, one that is separate from
that of the main text but is still critical to the
Covak 20
instruction of the lesson at hand. Indeed, the similarities

between O'Connor's parable and Jesus' New Testament parables
suggest O'Connor may even have grounded her form in the New
Testament. In his extensive study of O'Connor's use of the
form, John R. May discusses the symbolic nature of parable
in The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O'Connor:
[T]he parables of Jesus are not allegories but
dramatic narratives involving conflicts between
human beings that symbolize rather than describe
man's relationship to ultimate reality [. . . and
they] achieve [their] effect aesthetically; that
is symbolically, figuratively, indirectly. (14)
O'Connor achieves a similar effect through her use of
symbolism to represent Mrs. Turpin's realization
"symbolically, figuratively, indirectly": rather than
stating her message of equality and writing simply that Mrs.
Turpin realizes the error of her ways, O'Connor brings about
her message indirectly, using the symbols and themes of the
New Testament to illustrate her point.
O'Connor's parables are further similar to Jesus' in
that they, too, address the inner conflicts between humans
and God and dramatize the moment humans attempt to resolve
that conflict. Incorporating the element of symbolism
directs the reader's focus towards an eternal reality rather
C o vak 21
than a temporal one. If, as Bible scholar Dominic Crossan

notes, "'Parables [. . .] give God room1 by shattering the
'deep structure of our accepted world,1 removing our
defences and so opening us to the transcendent,1" then, by
delineating the temporal and eternal worlds through the

parable, O'Connor easily maneuvers the discussion towards
the moment of grace as it is depicted in Christianity (qtd.
in Wright 55). With this move completed, a connection can be
made between Mrs. Turpin's inner conflict and God, which, in
turn, indicates it is not her inner conflict that is
resolved, but her conflict with God. Textual descriptions
provide the dramatic effect May mentions. For example, after
she challenges God, "[t]he color of everything, field and
crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent
intensity'' and the pigs in the pen nearby are surrounded by
a red glow, " appear[ing] to pant with a secret life1' (216-
17). Furthermore, the parable is introduced with the line,
" A visionary light settled in her eyes" - an obvious
demarcation in the text, one that is all the more
substantial because it announces the moment of grace. And
the image of Mrs. Turpin "rais[ing] her hands from the side
of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound," with its
implication of submission and parallelism to the practice in
Covak 22
some Christian worship of lifting hands in surrender

certainly adds an element of the dramatic.
The parable in "Revelation'1 interweaves the religious
makings of grace with the literary necessities for
narrative. As a parable, it recounts Mrs. Turpin's encounter
with her moment of grace; as a narrative, it contains its
own plot and symbolism. O'Connor's parable, which details
Mrs. Turpin's moment of grace, is as follows:
She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge
extending upward from the earth through a field of
living fire. Upon it a horde of souls were
rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies
of white-trash, clean for the first time intheir
lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes,
and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and
clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up
the end of the procession was a tribe of people
whom she recognized at once as those who, like
herself [. . .] has a little of everything and the
God-given wit to use it right. [. . .] Yet she
could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away.[. . .]
In a moment the vision faded but she remained
where she was, immobile. (217-18)
C ovak 23
For clarity's sake, I will discuss the contents of this

parable in two sections: the first will focus on its
narrative structure, the second on O'Connor's use of
symbolism in it to indirectly convey the significant
features of Mrs. Turpin's moment of grace.
The Narrative structure

Within the main narrative of O'Connor's short story,
the parable functions as an interpolated narrative. The plot
unfolds as a series of interrelated descriptions that
broaden to include each new group of souls traversing the
bridge until another story is constructed that exists within
the frame story of "Revelation.'1 We begin with the purple
streak Mrs. Turpin catches sight of in the sky "cutting
through a field of crimson and leading [. . .] into a
descending dusk" (217). In the parable, the streak becomes
the bridge that crosses atop the fire: together with the
line that announces the parable and the dramatic elements
that precede it, the bridge temporarily departs from the
events of the frame narrative to focus instead on the events
of the interpolated narrative. When the assemblage of people
- "the white-trash," "the black niggers," and "the
freaks and lunatics" - appear on the bridge, a set of
characters emerge to follow the change in setting. The
assemblage also provides the first hints of a message to the
C ovak 24
parable: because of their deviation from the norms the frame

narrative has established, the clean white-trash, the blacks
in white robes, and the leaping freaks all require
interpretation - one that will explain their presence in the
parable, for instance.

Other indications there is an imbedded message soon
follow. Mrs. Turpin next sees a group of people in whose
category she assigns herself; when she observes them more
closely, however, she notices that the air of superiority
they emit is soon dashed when the fire begins to burn their
virtues away. The vision abruptly ends here, but its message
now seems complete: Mrs. Turpin belongs to the group whose
assumptions of supremacy are erroneous and, if prolonged,
they will prove fatal. Of course, the double implication of
a physical death as well as a spiritual one should not be
overlooked. The group's "shocked and altered faces1' upon
realizing "their virtues were being burned away"
represents an actual burning as a result of the fire
reaching them on the bridge and - if the fires are
interpreted as a symbol of hell and the virtues indicate a
false sense of religious superiority - signifies a predicted
spiritual burning that will end with being damned to hell.
Thus, the narrative structure of O'Connor's parable ties
together the literal and the spiritual to create an
C o v a k 25
interpolated narrative possessing its own setting,

characters, symbolism, and message.
Symbolism in the Parable
O'Connor employs Biblical symbolism to reveal the

significance of the details of Mrs. Turpin's moment of
grace. The symbols of fire, the white robes, the procession,
and the virtuous humans, all present in the "Revelation''
parable, are symbols also found in the New Testament; these
symbols represent key elements of the Christian doctrine of
grace. There are several similarities between the context of
these symbols in the Bible and in O'Connor's short story.
First, O'Connor describes the bridge "extending upward from
the earth through a field of living fire'' (217). In the New
Testament, fire often symbolizes God's wrath on the day of
judgment, an accounting before God when all people will be
held responsible for actions committed while alive on earth.
This connection between fire and day of judgment is
reiterated frequently in the Bible: 2 Peter 3.7, for
example, reads, " B y the same word the present heavens and
earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of
judgment [. . (New International Version). Thus, the
fire below the bridge represents the day of judgment - an
event most often associated with one's death and, by
extension, the deaths of those crossing the bridge. This
C o v a k 26
symbolizes a move toward grace for, as Christian doctrine

holds, one cannot proceed to heaven before God orders death
and judgment.
Next, the narrator describes the lower-class citizens
as dressed in white robes: Revelation 7.9 details the
[. . .] great multitude [. . .] from every nation,
tribe, people and language f. . .] wearing white
robes [. . .] and cry[ing] out in a loud voice:
"Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the
throne [. . .] '' (New International Version)
The white robes symbolize atonement; moreover, because they
are the wardrobe worn by every person regardless of social
categorizations, those wearing the white robes represent
unity between humans of every background, a unity that most
certainly includes those people Mrs. Turpin deems less
worthy of God's approval. This error in Mrs. Turpin's
perception is further realized through the order of the
procession since "sh e [Mrs. Turpin] eventually allows [the
image] to shatter her illusions of superiority to 'trashy'
people [. . .]Flannery O'Connor has given brilliant
contemporary expression to Jesus' teaching that the first
shall be last and the last first" (May 13). Stated another
way, O'Connor captures in one phrase a recurring theme in
the New Testament, namely that those who place their
C o v a k 27
allegiance with worldly riches shall not be judged as having

the most, but as having the least. Finally, the parable
concentrates on the group of people amongst whom Mrs. Turpin
classifies herself, describing them as "those who [. . .]
has always had a little of everything and the God-given wit
to use it right*' (217). She soon witnesses their virtues
being burned away, "burned away by the fire of truth**
(Dowell 237). In the New Testament, the notion of virtue is
commonly interchanged with the concept of works, those deeds
many feel replace faith in the acceptance of God.
Consequently, the truth that burns away " v i r t u e " - that
is, the " g o o d works*1 of humankind - refers to the New
Testament injunction " i t is by grace you have been saved,
through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift
of God - not by works, so that no one can boast11
(Eph. 2.8-9). The symbolism of fire suggests the destruction
of reliance on good works for salvation rather than God's
grace. Another explanation of the fire focuses on a
misconception of what virtues are: it is possible that the
virtues to which the narrator refers as being burned away
are actually not virtues at all. Instead, they are

mistakenly conceived as virtues and must, therefore, be
removed before one can proceed to heaven.
Covak 28
Arguably, O'Connor includes these critical aspects to

continuously incorporate God into a moment of spiritual
awakening. She strategically connects God and character
through her use of symbolism to document the human change
that occurs in response to what she calls " a mystery — our
redemption through God's grace. She believe[d] that the best
way to approach this mystery was through metaphor and
story" (Helmer "Stumbling"). This approach, as both the
symbolism of the New Testament and O'Connor's fiction
attest, illuminates the moment when an individual
comprehends that death, faithfulness, judgment, and
atonement are all realizations that initiate change in human
behavior. When this process of realization culminates with a
moment of acceptance and change, the person has encountered
her moment of grace.
The Question of Transformation
But what change does Mrs. Turpin undergo as a result of

her vision? The text supplies few details after the
cessation of Mrs. Turpin's vision; however, the last line of
the parable provides some clues about the alteration in Mrs.
Turpin's behavior. The narrator recounts "she remained
where she was, immobile," concerned more with eternity's
voices shouting hallelujah (218). This newly piqued interest
in the eternal is a change from the unaware racist we first
Covak 29
meet. The opening pages of the story portray Mrs. Turpin as

absorbed by worldly matters such as weight, dress, and
beauty. She remarks, for example, " I wish I could reduce,"
and describes the women in the room as well-dressed, white-
trashy, and stylish (O'Connor 193). But her preoccupation
with the faces of the women is most telling of her vanity.
When she notices Mary Grace's skin is " b l u e with acne,"
Mrs. Turpin reminds herself that, although she is fat, " s h e
[has] always had good skin" (194). Other observations are
briefer, but no less revealing: she describes a thin woman
across the room as having a "leathery" face, and notes the
white-trashy woman is " gritty-looking" because " t h e rims
of her lips were stained with snuff' (194). None of this
interest in the worldly, however, is present in the end;
rather, the story's last image is of a newly reflective Mrs.
Turpin interested more in the cricket choruses and the
voices shouting hallelujah than in the trappings of vanity.
The Fi nal Effect
In an ironic play on assumptions, the interpolated

narrative of grace is the deeper, more preferred reality
while all natural conceptions of reality are, unexpectedly,
illusions. O'Connor's fiction "culminates in an image that
is true dramatically, psychologically, and morally [. . . ]
the unassailable dramatic image is closer to the vision than
C o v a k 30
any doctrinal equivalent [. . .] It is the image that is the

reality" (Orvell "Invisible" 27). Thus, O'Connor's
symbols are representations of the tangible terms of the
eternal reality; furthermore, Mrs. Turpin's change upon her
acceptance of grace resolutely directs the reader's
attention to the moment of grace as the most profound
reality thereby de-emphasizing the other more superficial
perceptions of temporal reality found earlier in the story.
O'Connor employs two narratives to document the human
mystery of grace. She once said, " A story is a way to say
something that can't be said any other way - you tell a
story because a statement would be inadequate" (qtd. in
Ryan 3). In her attempt to reveal the magnitude of grace,
O'Connor reconfigures the concepts of literary form and
religious belief; by coupling the two in "Revelation,"
O'Connor makes it virtually impossible to negotiate the text
without viewing form and faith as inextricably linked.
Throughout her stories, O'Connor's rendering of grace and
its impact on the world of her stories is her most
elaborately detailed feature. The world she creates is
peopled with the outcasts of society, those whose flaws and
misconceptions have marginalized them. For O'Connor, the
fuller truth is God's grace, and the parable is the
C o vak 31
narrative form through which she depicts the dramatic moment
humans accept that grace.
C o v a k 32
CHAPTER 2
The Mythic world of Grace in The G re a t D iv o rc e
Of the power of literature, C.S. Lewis once said,

"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining
the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions
which heal the wound, but they destroy the privilege.
[. . .] But in reading great literature I become a thousand
men and yet remain myself. [. . .] I transcend myself and am
never more myself than when I d o 11 (qtd. in Ryan 12 par.)
The preservation of the individual is especially pertinent
to grace, the topic Lewis chose to be the core of every work
of fiction - and much of the non-fiction - he produced. As a
Christian theologian, Lewis situates grace at the center of
every discussion regarding humanity's question of the
existence of God. Regardless of the method he employs to
tell them, Lewis's stories all have the same pattern:
someone is always searching for Truth, which is discovered
by attaining grace - the state of spiritual existence
achieved upon the choice to "admit that God is God"
(Hannay 14). In The Great Divorce, his mythic tale of a
would-be Christian's encounter with grace, Lewis casts
George MacDonald - a nineteenth-century Scottish minister
C o v a k 33
and novelist - as "the Teacher" who guides the narrator

through a series of exchanges, each detailing a character's
refusal of grace. By the end of the story, the narrator is
contemplating his own grace (or absence of it) while the
reader discovers the story has all been a dream, a figment
of the narrator's imagination realized only after he
"aw[akes] in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a
black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the
siren howling overhead" (125).
Published in 1946, this story is a myth embedded in a
dream that ultimately details one human's journey toward

grace. We are introduced to the narrator as he stands in
line at a bus stop surrounded by a city of gray where it is
never brighter than twilight or as dark as night. When the
bus finally arrives, the passengers - including the narrator
- are transported to a brighter city where ~~[t]here were no
lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss"
(26). Immediately the narrator realizes that both he and his
traveling companions all have "distorted and faded" faces,
not fully whole but not entirely formless, either. According
to Thomas Raney Watson in his analysis of the elements of
parody in Divorce, the narrator's trip is the mythic
representation of man's journey from the " c i t y of Satan,"
- the dark parallel Satan has created to mirror heaven - to
Covak 34
the "city of God1' where the grass feels sharp and apples
of gold bend the boughs of the trees (par 9). Under the
guidance of the Teacher, the narrator traverses the city of
God where he observes other Ghosts like himself. They all
converse with angelic beings called Bright Spirits about
their particular spiritual vices. These conversations are
glimpses of various moments of grace where the characters
choose to either accept or reject God. Through his dream,
the narrator is afforded the opportunity before death that
all others only receive after - namely the chance to
experience both heaven and hell without choosing either.
Lewis's purpose here is twofold. First, he remains true
to the literary experience he so highly prizes, but, more
importantly, he prompts his reader to ponder what he
believed was the supreme theological questions proposed to
mankind: does God exist and must we choose to accept Him? In
this chapter, I will divide my discussion into two sections.
The first explores the questions surrounding Lewis's choice
to present grace in the form of a myth within a dream: for
instance, what about myth makes it so effective as a device
for illustrating conversion? Why station a subject Lewis
considered so real as grace in a tale so unbelievable even
its ending leaves the reader questioning what was fact and
what was fiction? The second section foregrounds the moments
C o v a k 35
of grace in Divorce by applying a template of the necessary

components of attaining grace and applying it to the one
conversion in the text. This section is perhaps most
critical to assessing Lewis1s rendering of grace because it
evaluates the effect of strategically placing the one
conversion that occurs in the story in the privileged
position of the end in order to overtly label that moment as
preferable. This move not only leads to the text's climax,
but also fulfills the progressively intensifying narrative
where each subsequent character comes closer to attaining
grace. Thus, by exploring the many ways humans do not accept
God, Lewis’s narrative form facilitates a fuller
understanding of why one character does; by depicting what
it is like to be without God, Lewis makes the move toward
God seem logical and therefore desirable. This is the
consummate intellectual's approach to apologetics for which
Lewis remains so famous, for to merely tell the reader what
to think and why without producing a story that stimulates
reason would be contrary to Lewis's very nature.
In Divorce, the narrator journeys through a mythic city
of God where the purity of angels and the obsessions of
sinners intersect to create a land of second chances and
eternal possibilities. Lewis constructs this particular
narrative of grace through a series of character sketches or
Covak 36
" windows11 that depict various spiritual vices such as

selfish love and irreverent intellectualism. Lewis's appeal
to readers' imaginations enables him to reach them on their
various levels. But the use of vivid images is not what
marks Lewis's work for most scholars; rather, it is
"Lewis's storytelling and myth-making [that] are regarded
by many as the high point of his work'' (Mueller 297).
imagination in the Myth
Lewis's definition of myth most succinctly summarized

is a narrative form in which " w e come nearest to
experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood
only as an abstraction'' (qtd. in Goffar 416). This might
explain Lewis's use of metaphoric language since, as Clyde
Kilby writes in The Christian World of C.S. Lewis, if
" [m]yth does not essentially exist in words at a l l , " then
we must rely on images to complete the work (123). Verbal
images, it would seem, allow for a broader gamut of
interpreted significance; if the writer simply tells the
reader what to think, there is little room for individual
thought, an exercise Lewis valued as much as the work
itself. However, the images Lewis's metaphors produce permit
him to convey his message of grace without hampering the
reader's individual potential to extract a personal meaning
from the text. This at once causes the reader to contemplate
Covak 37
grace and thus fulfill Lewis's purpose, namely to introduce

each reader to grace through whatever means she is ready to
meet it. Thus, Lewis intends his images to bridge literature
and theology in the hope that reading grace will actually
encourage the reader to accept it. This "conversion via
text" appeals to the mechanism of imagination to disclose
the peculiar ways readers interpret the moment of grace.
The method of interpretation, however, is an entirely
different matter. To understand the message beneath the
images of the myth, we need a tool egually useful for the
message of grace and the form of myth. Imagination meets
both these criteria while also representing what Lewis
believes is a fundamental connection to the "Reality" of a
sovereign God. Lewis scholars agree that Lewis believed
humanity's pursuit of that Reality is never more clearly
exhibited than through the interpretive power of myth. Kilby
elaborates:
What is the cause of myth-making? There is a
great, sovereign, uncreated, unconditioned Reality
at the core of things, and myth is on the one hand
a kind of picture-making which helps man to
understand this Reality and on the other hand the
result of a deep call from that Reality. Myth is a
"real though unfocused gleam of divine truth
C o v a k 38
falling on human imagination" which enables man

to express the inexpressible, (qtd. in Carnell
345)
Grace is, if nothing else, a human experience and one that
depends on transcending the obvious to encounter what lies
beyond. If we define myth as a kind of gestalt where the sum
is greater than the parts, then the message behind the myth
is the desired end while the metaphoric images are only the
means to attaining it. Lewis1s myth stimulates the
imagination to recollect concrete human experiences thereby
enabling the reader to associate the tangible past with the
abstract notion of grace. Furthermore, through imagination,
the reader's focus shifts from mere words to the message
they communicate. Lewis believed a transcendence like this
was critical to reading grace: in his collection
Rehabilitations and Other Essays, he discusses Shelley's
version of the Prometheus myth commenting, "'Like all great
myths, its primary appeal is to the imagination: its
indirect and further appeal to the will and understanding
can therefore be diversely interpreted according [to the
reader]'" (qtd. in Hart 14).

While Lewis employs myth to convey a message in other
texts such as Till We Have Faces, nowhere does he so
extensively utilize myth's appeal to the imagination to
Covak 39
influence the reader's will and emotion than in Divorce.

Lewis begins his story with, " I seemed to be standing in a
bus queue by the side of a long, mean street"; he concludes
with the narrator waking to find himself slumped at his
desk. However, the reader is not initially aware that the
story is a dream; the beginning offers no clues that the
narrator imagines the story while sleeping, nor do any
emerge as the text progresses. Only in the final paragraph
does the narrator reveal he has, in fact, fallen asleep at
his desk and dreamed his journey through the city of God.
This withholding protects against an instinctual devaluing
of text on the reader's part. If the dream is presented as a
plausible configuration of events then its potential to be
regarded as more than mere fantasy remains intact. However,
if the story emerges as only a figment of the narrator's
imagination, that potential is compromised: readers are
accustomed to compartmentalizing a dream as strictly fantasy
and, if they do so, Lewis's attempts to personalize grace
through imagination and reality are in vain. Consequently,
Lewis must couch the dream carefully, for its complex
purpose allows for only a modicum amount of slippage. This
is only one aspect of Lewis's multifaceted narrative,
however.
C o v a k 40
Narrative Form in the Myth

Lewis1s narrative form is a multi-sequenced layer of
storytelling that is best described as an interpolated
narrative within a frame narrative- On one level exists the
frame of the narrator's reality; while largely
unacknowledged, this narrative is crucial to the unveiling
of the dream at the text's end. On the next level lies the
interpolated narrative - the dream - which contains the
account of the narrator's journey through the city of God.
Included in this narrative are the series of encounters
between the Ghosts and Bright Spirits. These interactions
constitute more than mere departures from the frame
narrative, however; they are also Lewis's means of depicting
various moments of grace.

In her article "Cyberage Narratology: Computers,
Metaphor, and Narrative," Marie Laure Ryan assigns the term
"windows" to " a narrative unit delimited by what can be
shown of a textual world in one 'take,' [. . . as it]
follows certain objects or focuses on one location for a
specific time span" (130). While Ryan uses it to illustrate
how a narrative shifts in electronic texts, the term
"windows" also fits the moves of Lewis's interpolated
narrative. The encounters with the Ghosts all take place in
the textual world of the city of God; furthermore, because
C o vak 41
they focus on one character for a limited amount of time, we

are able to examine the moment of grace as it pertains to
the individual and the sin that overpowers her. These takes
are the means by which we view all of the characters at
their moments of grace. They also delineate where the
narrative shifts within the interpolated dream since, to
borrow an old adage, where one window closes, another one
opens. The windows, then, link episodes in the interpolated
narrative rather than creating entirely separate,
disconnected narratives. Moreover, while these windows
function only as momentary glimpses into the many possible
combinations of people, sin, and grace, they are,
nevertheless, excellent evangelical tools. Myth excites the
imagination, and what better way to challenge his readers'
beliefs than for Lewis to transport them to an imaginary
realm where they can be free of Reality's constraints?
It is interesting - and, indeed, perhaps most
important - to note that these windows also supply a visual
rendering of Lewis's notion of grace. Furthermore, a series
of steps can be extrapolated from these windows using the
five components consistently present in each of Lewis's
depictions of grace:
1. First, the character is presented in a "pre-grace"
C o v a k 42
state; there is an abandonment of will to a sinful

nature that, in Lewis's work, is often exemplifed
most strongly by a particular spiritual vice or sin.
2. Secondly, the character is provided with an
opportunity to receive grace; in other words, he is
informed of grace as an attainable option.
3. Next, the character must repent. This means he must
both acknowledge the controlling influence of the
sin and desire freedom from it.
4. Then, the character must choose to accept the
absolute existence of God, a decision Lewis also
equates to a willingness to receive G o d 1s love and
forgiveness. This choice - as distinct from
repentance - is an outward commitment to alter the
behavior and thinking that characterizes the sinful
nature.
5. Finally, as a result of repentance from sin and
acceptance of God, the character undergoes a
miraculous change, generated by the grace and power
of God. This change can be physical or spiritual and
is often both; moreover, the change always results
in the adoption of a new nature free from the
control of the pre-grace sin.
Covak 43
A progression through the narrative windows of Divorce,

then, at once reveals how characters move toward the moment
of grace and illustrates Lewis's own notion of grace in his
fiction.
Grace in the Myth
One of Lewis's earliest windows depicts a character

moving through these steps toward grace. The narrator
eavesdrops on a conversation between a Bright Person, Dick,
and a Ghost — an unwavering intellectual - who seems
entirely unwilling to admit he indulges in sinful behavior.
Dick informs him he has been residing in Hell (the gray
city), but - in a response indicative of his pre-grace state
- the Ghost staunchly refuses to concede such a place might
even exist. Nevertheless, he indulges Dick in a conversation
about the matter:
" G o on, my dear boy, go on. [. . .] No doubt
you'll tell me why, on your view, I was sent
there. [. . .] "
" B u t don't you know? You went there because
you are an apostate.''
" A r e you serious, Dick? [. . . ] Do you really
think people are penalized for their honest
opinions? [. . .] "
" D o you really think there are no sins of
C ovak 44
intellect?" (40)
In an ironic twist, the Ghost's sin of irreverent
intellectualism prevents him from differentiating apostasy
and an "honest opinion," a failure that prompts Dick to
question the foolishness of the very intellect the Ghost
prizes. The two continue their debate on the nuances between
the worship of intellect and the heroism of honest opinions
until Dick interrupts:
" L e t us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly
come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with
a certain current of ideas and plunged into it
because it seemed modern and successful. At
College, you know, we just started automatically
writing the kind of essays that got good marks and
saying the kind of things that won applause.
[. . .] When did we put up one moment1s real
resistance to the loss of our faith?" (41)
Dick attempts to dismantle the Ghost's erroneously
ideal notions of intellectualism by exposing the flawed
means under which it was contrived. Yet, despite his earnest
efforts to appeal to the sensibilities by which the Ghost so
steadfastly abides, Dick is unable to change the
intellectual's mind. He reaches out once more saying, " I
have come a long journey to meet you. You have seen Hell:
C o v a k 45
you are in sight of Heaven. Will you, even now, repent and
believe?" But his friend only responds resolutely, " I ' m
not sure that I've got the exact point you are trying to
make" (43). It is not surprising, then, that his inability
to conceptualize grace as existing outside of the scope of
his intellect discontinues the process of grace at the third
step: his refusal to "get the point" Dick is making
indicates the Ghost's refusal of grace.
The mother consumed by selfish love provides another
illustration of a lost moment of grace. In a later chapter
the narrator remembers, "On e of the most painful meetings
we witnessed was between a woman's Ghost and a Bright Spirit
who had apparently been her brother" (89). This woman, Pam,
is grieving the loss of her son, Michael, whom she believes
God has stolen from her in a cruel imposition of power; yet,
her obsessive love for her child and her bitterness over his
death have left her as angry and alone in death as she was
in life. Consequently, Pam must overcome her vice of selfish
love if she is to progress to grace and heaven. At her
moment of grace, her brother, the Bright Spirit, explains:
Human beings can't make one another really happy
for long. [. . .] He [God] wanted your merely
instinctive love for your child [. . .] to turn
into something better. He wanted you to love
C o vak 46
Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a

fellow creature fully till you love God. [. . .]
But there was, it seems, no chance of that in your
case. The instinct was uncontrolled and fierce and
monomaniac. [. . .] The only remedy was to take
away its object. It was a case for surgery. (91)
Despite her brother's offer of grace and explanation of its
necessity, the woman still refuses to accept the
opportunity. Indeed, Pam's move toward grace halts at the
second step: there is certainly a pre-grace state (the woman
is clearly consumed by her selfish love), but Pam, despite
Reginald's efforts to present the contrary, sees no reason
to admit her love for Michael is anything less than
admirable and righteous:
"What right have you to say things like that
about Mother-love? It is the highest and holiest
feelings in human nature. [. . .] My love for
Michael would never have gone bad. Not if we'd
lived together for millions of years.1' (92)
Consequently, Pam's attitude precludes her from claiming
repentance, and her option of grace remains unchosen.
The narrator continues his account with subsequent
stories of a self-righteous businessman, a thief who tries
to steal the golden apples, a woman unwilling to forsake
C o v a k 47
vanity, and Frank, the prideful lover scorned by the Lady of

the city of God. Through the multiple windows of Divorce,
Lewis leads us through a series of spiritual misses, where
characters approach grace only to abandon their pursuit in
the end. But, by providing so many misses, Lewis creates a
crescendo effect where the tension and expectation of a full
moment of grace build continuously until the reader, now
fully contemplating grace, encounters the text's only
conversion.
Conversion in the Myth
This transformation delineates a departure from the

previous windows' patterns. There is a single constant
amongst the many windows of Divorce: in each narrative, the
Ghosts do not experience any change. They are either unable
to understand the need for change, or they simply refuse to
part with the vice that binds them. As the Teacher observes,
"There is always something they insist on keeping, even at
the price of misery. There is always something they prefer
to joy - that is, to reality'' (69). Only one character
undergoes a change, and his marks the only complete moment
of grace in the text. We first encounter the character in
his state of pre-grace; he remains locked in the grip of his
spiritual vice (lust) and is observed just before he meets
an Angel:
C o v a k 48
I saw coming toward us a Ghost who carried

something on his shoulder. Like all the Ghosts, he
was unsubstantial [. . .] What sat on his shoulder
was a little red lizard, and it was twitching its
tail like a whip and whispering things in his ear.
As we caught sight of him he turned his head to
the reptile with a snarl of impatience. "Shut up,
I tell you!" he said. It wagged its tail and
continued to whisper to him. He ceased snarling,
and presently began to smile. Then he turned and
started to limp westward, away from the mountains.
"Off so soon?'1 said a voice. (96-97)
This illustration reguires the reader to employ his
imagination to visualize lust using the unappealing image of
a lizard. This visualization is what John T. Stahl refers to
as a "personified abstraction" in his article " T h e Nature
and Function of Myth in the Christian Thought of C.S.
Lewis.11 He adds that such representations allow what cannot
be adeguately communicated in literal speech to be shown as
the "conscious representation of what we actually
exp&rience" (333). Lewis conveys this experience in several
ways. First, he chooses to color the lizard red, which often
signifies passion. It is positioned on the man's shoulder, a
place that allows it to whisper in the man's ear: to be
Covak 49
rationalized in the mind of its captor, lust must make

itself explainable and therefore permissable. Its tail
twitches like a whip: it is the master, the man its slave.
Finally, after a whisper from the lizard, the Ghost turns
from the mountains that mark the passage to Heaven. Each of
these factors contributes to the Ghost's pre—grace state and
communicates the overpowering influence of a sinful nature.
When the Angel appears, the second step in the progress
toward grace occurs: the Angel offers grace asking, "Would
you like me to make him [the lizard] quiet?" (97). When the
Ghost answers he would, the Angel approaches to kill it;
however, the Ghost quickly recants saying, "Honestly, I
don't think there's the slightest necessity for that. I'm
sure I shall be able to keep it in order now. [. . .] It's
gone to sleep of its own accord. I'm sure it'll be all right
now" (98). This wavering continues until the Ghost relents,
" I t would be better to be dead than to live with this
creature" (99). Through this admission - which completes
the third step - the narrator communicates both an awareness
of his sin and a desire to be free from it. When at last the
Ghost relents crying, "'God help me. God help me,''' he

takes the fourth step toward grace: by asking God for help,
the Ghost expresses a willingness to receive God's love and
forgiveness and to acknowledge the existence of God (99).
Covak 50
While each of these steps provides a specific insight into

the particulars of grace, the fifth step of transformation
proves to be the most illuminating in the conversion. When
the Ghost changes before the narrator's eyes, he recounts:
For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly.
Then I saw [. . .] unmistakably solid but growing
every moment solider, the upper arm and the
shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still and
stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden
head materialised while I watched, and if my
attention had not wavered I should have seen the
actual completing of a man - an immense man,
naked, not much smaller than the Angel. (100)
Just as the template predicts, the physical alteration of
the Ghost follows the spiritual, and the outer appearance
reflects the inward acceptance of grace. However, this new
self must still emerge as separate from the control of the
pre-grace sin. To illustrate this severance, Lewis also
transforms the lizard into a new entity, one that better
suits the now altered Ghost:
[A]t the same moment something seemed to be
happening to the Lizard. [. . .] So far from
dying, the creature was still struggling and even
growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it
Covak 51
changed. Its hinder parts grew rounder. The tail,

still flickering, became a tail of hair that
flickered between huge and glossy buttocks.
Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What
stood before me was the greatest stallion I have
ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of
gold. (100)
Both of these transformations represent Lewis•s
renegotiation of the relationship between the Ghost and the

lizard. The once incomplete being has now become a whole man
whose new body reflects the original conception of human as
innocent flesh (the transformed man is naked and unashamed).
Similarly, the measly, abhorrent manifestation of the man's
unyielding lust has now become a strong, beautiful vehicle
for passage into heaven: " I n joyous haste the young man
leaped upon the horse's back. [. . .] [T]hey were [. . .]
soon among the foothills of the mountains [and] they
vanished, bright themselves, into the rose-brightness of
that everlasting morning" (101). Thus, with these
transformations complete, the new convert may now fully
experience grace by entering heaven, and Lewis's mythic tale
is complete - or so it would seem.
However, the question of the narrator's dream and what
will become of him after his mythic journey still remains.
C o v a k 52
Lewis begins his last chapter with, " A n d suddenly all was
changed*1 (123). The narrator sees chessmen standing on a
table that signifies Time and soon understands that the
chessmen are the "moving portrait[s] [. . .] which
delineated the inmost nature1' of people's perceptions, both
of themselves and of the others around them. Startled by
this realization, the narrator questions the Teacher:
" I s that the truth? Then is all that I have been
seeing in this country false? These conversations
between the Spirits and the Ghosts - were they
only the mimicry of choices that had really been
made long ago?" (124)
And so begins the narrator's own encounter with grace. It is
never absolutely clear what the narrator decides about his
own opportunity for grace - he awakens from his dream before
we find out. This omission leaves some room for disagreement
about the narrator's fate. Watson interprets the narrator's
awakening to the sunrise and recognition he is but a ghost
as a sign a conversion has taken place. However, I propose
that, by leaving the conclusion unspoken, Lewis once again
challenges his reader to think for herself, to ponder what
the narrator's decision might be and, in so doing,
contemplate what her own decision would be in similar
circumstances. Whatever the case, Lewis does not leave the
C o v a k 53
reader entirely without clues. The Teacher’s response to his

pupil's question hints that the narrator's choice of grace
may still exist: " O r might ye not as well say,
anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all
things?" (124). And, again in his Teacher's response, there
lies a warning that certainly implies an impending choice:
" Y e saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see
them on earth: the lens was clearer. [. . .] Do not ask of a
vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give''
(124). But without a clear indication of their meaning,
these remain only inklings of a potential conversion of the
narrator. Consequently, we are left to decipher the
Teacher's admonitions and wonder, like the narrator, where
our own journey of grace fits within our destiny.
Lewis skillfully manipulates his text to communicate
the fullest experience of grace possible. Working within the
parameters of a frame and interpolated narrative, he
constructs a dream comprised of a series of windows that
allow the reader to glimpse a variety of moments of grace,
each exploring a particular spiritual vice and ultimately
concluding - with the exception of the last one - in the
Ghosts' refusals of grace. His use of verbal images to
stimulate the innate human tendency to imagine an
experience achieves far more than the mere words on the
C ovak 54
page: by juxtaposing theology and literature in his

portraits of grace, Lewis achieves his ultimate goal of
healing the wound without undermining the privilege of
individuality. And in Divorce, especially, Lewis transcends
literary boundaries to communicate the necessity of grace
leaving us to ponder still humanity's most unrelenting
theological questions: Does God exist and must we choose to
accept Him?
Covak 55
CHAPTER 3
A Doublevoicing of Grace in The Screwtape L e t t e r s
Many of Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin's theories

center on the peculiar ways a text conveys not only who is
speaking, but who else is speaking. By theorizing that
voices in a text reflect not only the ideology - the system
of belief and way of thinking - of the speaking character,
but of its author, as well, Bakhtin resituates the
boundaries of literary theory to include the possibility
that an underlying discussion between these two voices may
occur in a text. Moreover, the suggestion that there is more
than one voice and, consequently, more than one ideology
involved in the discourse of any text increases the
potential for a wide variety of assertions regarding the
meaning of the text itself, i.e. what is the message the
author is conveying, and what is its implication for the
reader? Such is the case in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape
Letters (Screwtape).
Published in 1961, Screwtape is steeped in double
voiced discourse (or doublevoicedness) and rich with complex
narration and author construction. It provides an ideal

opportunity to explore how doublevoicedness functions in a
text where the lines between the identities of author and
Covak 56
character are overtly blurred. Despite its multiple sets of

voices and ideologies, the plot of Screwtape is actually
quite simple. A series of letters are exchanged between
Screwtape - the undersecretary of the devil hierarchy - and
his nephew Wormwood, a rather lowly trainee working his
first assignment. His task? Convince a human, called " t h e
patient,11 to choose hell over heaven. While the reader is
privy only to the content of Screwtape's letters, his
responses to Wormwood's near-failures and lost opportunities
indirectly reveal the substance of his nephew's letters, as
well. The bulk of the text is comprised of Screwtape's
rhapsodies on various theological tenets - prayer, love, and
faith, for example - that serve to simultaneously express
the devils' ideology and instruct Wormwood regarding the
appropriate action to ensure the patient will not be lost to
"the Enemy,'' God. Each letter details the newest maneuver
in a spiritual battle to win the patient's soul. At the
story's end, we find the patient fully dedicated to his
faith while Screwtape, his schemes now defeated, is left to
bemoan the loss of yet another patient, which is marked by

the emergence of the voice of Christianity - Lewis's voice -
as the victor of the spiritual battle.
This battle is communicated through two voices that
sometimes oppose and sometimes complement. The first voice -
C ovak 57
the author's - expresses a Christian ideology; the second

voice*- Screwtape's - expresses, at different times in the
text, both his own anti-God ideology and a refraction of
Lewis's Christian ideology. Moreover, because the two voices
have two different ideologies and therefore two different
intentions, two distinct perspectives of the same occasion
of grace can simultaneously be in place: one (Lewis's)
privileges grace as an event of spiritual enlightenment, the
other (Screwtape's ) perceives it as a threat to an
established power and attempts to subvert it. The impact of
this textual rivalry is twofold: first, it brings the
question of what is good and evil to the forefront of the
reader's mind and, secondly, it challenges her to discern
for herself what voice offers the most credible depiction of
grace. Consequently, the voices of author and character are
in constant struggle, each believing the other's ideology to
be inherently wrong; yet, together, they represent a fuller
representation of humanity's struggle to survive the
temptations of evil.
In this chapter, I examine how that struggle is
conveyed in Screwtape primarily through the interplay of two
voices that conclude with an emphasis on Lewis's Christian
ideology as the most preferable in the text. In the first
half of the chapter, I will identify the characteristics of
C o v a k 58
Screwtape*s and Lewis's voice and analyze how the latter*s

is embedded within the former's. Furthermore, I will explain
what about Lewis's selected narrative form is inverted and
how the story's ending overturns that inversion. In the
second half, I will concentrate on how Screwtape takes the
Bakhtinian notion of doublevoicedness a step further. Rather
than sharing equal status in the text, the two voices in
Screwtape continue in their cycle of opposition and
agreement until Screwtape's voice adopts a defeated tone
that results in the favoring of Lewis's voice and its
rational ideology. But the final emphasis on Lewis's voice
leads me to question why Lewis chooses to convey the message
of grace through an opposing voice in the first place: why
not just choose a narrator who already holds the ideology he
will favor in the end? I suggest the answer is twofold.
First, by narrating grace in two opposing voices, Lewis
presents both sides of humanity's struggle to choose good
over evil and challenges the reader to evaluate his own
sense of the terms and their application to his own life.
Secondly, by having Christianity's enemy admit his defeat
and defer to the very ideology he so despises, Lewis
privileges Christianity as both the victor in the battle and
the preferred ideology for the reader. Indeed, by examining
the various ways Lewis encourages us to entertain
C o v a k 59
Screwtape's orations without entirely accepting his

ideology, we attain a better understanding of why we
champion the patient's journey toward grace even as it is
being conveyed through Screwtape.
D o u b le -V o ic e d D is c o u rs e D e fin e d
Bakhtin's essay "Discourse in the Novel" is his most

comprehensive elucidation of the various ways through which
we detect andcomprehend multiple voices in a text. In it,
he asserts that double-voiced discourse
serves two speakers at the same time and expresses
simultaneously two different intentions: the
direct intention of the character who is speaking
and the refracted intention of the author. In such
discourse there are two voices, two meanings and
two expressions. [. . .] [I]t is as if they
actually hold a conversation with one another.
(Dialogic 324)
This definition supplies two essential elements of my
discussion on the inverted nature of the text's narrative:
the presence of two speakers (the character and the author)
and the simultaneous communication of two intentions. The
interplay between the voices of the author and the character
is an example of how this separation of voices communicates
two distinct ideologies at once. In an explanation of how
C o v a k 60
this type of discourse operates, Bakhtin coins the term

"heteroglossia, '' defining it as the system of conditions
framing and constructing the context of an utterance that
once incorporated into the novel (whatever the
forms for its incorporation), is another's speech
in another's language, serving to express
authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such
speech constitutes double-voiced discourse.
(Dialogic 324)
In other words, as a participant independent of the author
in a particular narrative reality, Screwtape's speech style
is uniquely his, despite being created by the author. And
since he is, ultimately, an expression of Lewis's ideology,
Screwtape's speech style declares his own hatred of God and
also a deep need for His grace. Admittedly, there may be
room for disagreement in this particular Bakhtinian premise.
Contemporary criticism, for example, argues that - at best,
any knowledge of an author's intentions is difficult to
ascertain, and - at worst - entirely impossible to infer.
Thus, any statement that suggests such data can be obtained
through a comprehensive reading of multiple voices is
susceptible to critical scrutiny - and perhaps fairly so.
Moreover, it is often as complex to grasp the "intended
meaning" of a character's utterance; context does not
C ovak 61
always pave the way for a full discovery nor do such textual
elements as tone and emphasis, since the meaning of these
devices is often left entirely in the hands of the reader.
However, the marked ideological differences between
narrator and author in Screwtape appear to bypass such
textual dilemmas. By his own admission, Lewis holds a
Christian ideology, which refutes any assertions that his
basic views are unknowable; conseguently, Lewis's intention
becomes far more definable within the text itself. Likewise,
Lewis's depiction of the narrator as a proficient
manipulator leaves doubt as to Screwtape's intentions. Thus,
the commingling of Lewis and Screwtape's voices aligns
nicely with the definition of double-voiced discourse
Bakhtin provides.
An application of Bakhtin's theory also sheds light on
a conversation these two hold with one another. While the
text has no direct inclusion of Lewis's authorial voice
(there is no self-titled character; no dialogue where the
voice of Lewis, as a textual presence, speaks), it is
nonetheless unmistakably present in another manifestation. I
suggest the conversation exists in the writing process Lewis
underwent to speak of grace using the voice of a devil, a
difficult task on which he comments in his preface to
Screwtape:
C o vak 62
[T]hough I had never written anything more easily,

I never wrote with less enjoyment [and while] it
was easy to twist one1s mind into the diabolical
attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The
work into which I had to project myself while I
spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit,
thirst, and itch, (vii, xiii-xiv)
Lewis himself acknowledges he is speaking through Screwtape
and that he " t w i s t s " his mind into " t h e diabolical
attitude" to do it. This, too, supports Bakhtin's assertion
that a conversation between author and character does take
place in double-voiced discourse. To begin to locate each
voice in the conversation, however, we must determine what
each voice sounds like.
The sound of screwtape
Three characteristics are unique to Screwtape's voice:

a biting tone, a philosophical style, and what I label a
rhetoric of reversals. His biting tone is present most often
in the beginnings of his letters when he chastises or
ridicules his nephew's ineptitude. For example, when
Wormwood first informs him that the patient is not
succumbing to their ploys, Screwtape opens his return letter
with, " I t seems to me that you take a great many pages to
tell a very simple story"; after he explains to Wormwood
C o v a k 63
the " g r a v e " nature of their situation, he transitions to a

critique of his nephew saying, " A n d now for your blunders"
(Lewis 57-58). This disparagement of Wormwood's efforts is
echoed later when Screwtape comments, " T h e contemptuous way
in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls
[. . .] shows only your ignorance" (76-7). The impatience
conveyed in these passages is another manifestation of

Screwtape1s biting tone: his mentoring of Wormwood
exasperates him, a fact further evidenced in a later passage
that centers on the patient's churchgoing. When Screwtape
learns that the patient attends only one church, he
sarcastically queries Wormwood, " M a y I ask what you are
about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to
the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to
indifference it is a bad thing?" (72). In this instance,
Screwtape's biting tone is a response to his frustration
with the poor quality of Wormwood's work. His surprise at
his nephew's inability to assess the situation and provide
his uncle with the pertinent details results in Screwtape's
irritation and sarcasm. But Screwtape's biting tone is not
confined to his remarks, to Wormwood: while conferring about
the patient's new love, Screwtape remarks she is " [n]ot
only a Christian but such a Christian - a vile, sneaking,
simpering, demure [. . .] virginal, bread-and-butter miss!
Covak 64
The little brute! She makes me vomit" (101). Here, the

brutal candor with which Screwtape describes the girl is
matched only by his equally harsh word choices of " v i l e , "
"sneaking," and "simpering" to illustrate her character.
Finishing with " T h e little brute! She makes me vomit!"
adds a bit of humor to the mix: ironically, the very
characteristics most people would revere in the girl,
Screwtape despises, so much so he claims they make him
physically ill.
When Screwtape is not complaining about mortals or
bombarding Wormwood with jibes and criticisms, he is
instructing his nephew - and, indirectly, the reader - on
the technique of damnation in a style that is perhaps best
described as philosophical - but with an additional turn.
His directions are precise and to the point, but his manner
of delivery is reminiscent of the book of Proverbs. One such
similarity occurs when Screwtape informs Wormwood of how to
persuade the patient to socialize with people opposed to
Christianity: predicting that the patient will eventually
abandon his faith to retain his friends, Screwtape charges,
"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are
pretending to b e " (46). The matter-of-fact style of
Screwtape's phrasing makes his thoughts sound like adages;
indeed, in this case, both his words and the manner in which
C o v a k 65
they are conveyed are akin to Proverbs 22.24-25: " D o not

make friends with hot-tempered man
[. . .] or you may learn his ways and get yourself
ensnared" (The Full Life Study Bible). In a slightly more
expansive style that still maintains this air of precision,
Screwtape supplies Wormwood with a tactic for dissuading
humility in the patient:
Your patient has become humble: have you drawn his
attention to the fact? All virtues are less
formidable to us once the man is aware that he has
them, but this is specially true of humility.
[. . .] [S]muggle into his mind the gratifying
reflection, " B y jove! I'm being humble," and
almost immediately pride - pride at his own
humility - will appear. (62-3)
Screwtape goes on to note how the appearance of that pride
will distance the patient from God, a sentiment also present
in the proverb " W h e n pride comes, then comes dishonor, But

with the humble there is wisdom" (The Key Word Study Bible
Pr.11.2). But while both his tone and style contribute to
the makeup of his voice, Screwtape's most unique feature is
what I label a rhetoric of reversals.
This characteristic of Screwtape's voice further
emphasizes the inverted approach Lewis1s narrative takes to
C o v a k 66
presenting the patient's battle. In a simple overturning of

the labels religious rhetoric uses to categorize God and
Satan, Screwtape refers to Satan throughout the text as
" the Father" or " O u r Father Down Below," and, in a
similar reversal, he labels God "the Enemy." Furthermore,
where vices are connoted negatively in a Christian
perspective, to the devils, they are an excellent means of
discouraging the patient. Indeed, Screwtape plots against
the patient bearing in mind the positives of promoting his
vices: " B u t Hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice,
alone of all the vices, is purely painful - horrible to
anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred
has its pleasures" (136). Screwtape tampers even with the
typical Christian constructions of heaven, hell, and
conversion: conversion, in Screwtape's terms, means a choice
of hell over heaven, not the converse we expect. And, when
he mentions the patient's "conversion," Screwtape
elaborates, "Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual
one - the gentle slope [. . .] without signposts"; yet, his
hell is our notion of heaven (56). Screwtape's voice, then,
plays somewhat with a reader's expectations of labels and
the identities with which they are associated. Additionally,
the tone and style of his voice provide Screwtape with a
certain power indicative of his role as an authority figure
C ovak 67
over Wormwood and a once-removed manipulator of the patient.

But, even amidst Screwtape's ploys, Lewis's voice of
Christianity is not lost.

The Sound of Lewis
Notably, the closest we come to hearing the direct
voice of Christianity is in the passages where Screwtape
adopts the clipped style also prevalent in the book of
Proverbs. But there are also other instances in the text
where the characteristics of Screwtape's voice are subdued
to allow the voice of the intellect's Christianity to come
through. Most of these occurrences center around a brand of
logic peculiar to the kind an educated man such as Lewis
might possess. I refer again to Screwtape's address of
churchgoing for an example. Screwtape responds to his own
question of how to deter churchgoing with the statement that
begins his train of thought and then follows with a account
of his reasoning. He explains:
Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of
churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him
all over the neighbourhood looking for the church
that " s u i t s " him [. . .]. The reasons are
obvious. In the first place, parochial
organisation should always be attacked because
Covak 68
[. . .] it [brings] the kind of unity the Enemy

desires. The congregational principle [. . .]
makes each church into a kind of club, and
finally, [. . .] into a coterie or faction. In the
second place, the search for a "suitable'' church
makes the man a critic where the Enemy [God] wants
him to be a pupil. (72-3)
While we are aware that Screwtape is still narrating, we
temporarily depart from the tendencies of his voice to
listen to a kind of sermon on the dangers of refraining from
consistent church attendance. Indeed, the most efficient way
of assessing how this is an instance of the intellectually-
oriented Christian is to examine it in light of the absence
of the characteristics of Screwtape1s voice.
A Bakhtinian classification suggests Lewis's writing
style " i s engendered from the style of his inner speech,
which does not lend itself to control, and his inner speech
is itself the product of his entire social life11
("Contemporary11 486). With this in mind, several
indications of the prevalence of the Christian
intellectual's voice become apparent. First, the tone of the
passage is instructive, but not condemning; it lacks the
edge that typifies Screwtape's voice. The words themselves,
in fact, are indicative of a discourse that values clarity
Covak 6 9
and explanation - much like Lewis's own discourse of

education. As a tutor in Oxford, Lewis applied the same
method of teaching that had been applied to him as a
student, namely to write and discuss essays where " t h e
pupil gradually comes to learn to defend himself or herself
in argument, to have confidence in his or her own prose
style, to grow up intellectually" (Wilson 96). This would
explain Lewis's choice to use the phrases " I n the first
place" and " I n the second place" to guide his argument.
Moreover, phrases like "parochial organization" and
"congregational principle" suggest the speaker has a
knowledge of theology or, at the very least, religious
denominations - a knowledge Lewis, with his Anglican
background in church education, would certainly possess.
Even the vocabulary in the passage suggests Screwtape's is
not the prevalent voice: passages where Screwtape is clearly
speaking do not include words like " c o t e r i e " and
"faction." These words do, however, denote a high level of
education, which Lewis certainly obtained. This passage
represents Lewis's departure from Screwtape's lessons on
temptation to overtly comment on people's tendencies to

indulge in poor behavior and so spiritually damage
themselves by enlarging their distance from God. in addition
to their didactic quality, these passages also illustrate
C ovak 70
how the voice of the intellectual Christian is embedded in

Screwtape1s: without interrupting the flow of the narrative,
Lewis inserts his own voice into Screwtape1s sans any
textual markers that it is, indeed, the author speaking.
This is also another way the inverted style of narration is
reinforced.
Inversions Turned upright

We've already explored how the bulk of Lewis's
narrative plays on the reader's expectations: through
Screwtape's narration, we are privy to the devils'
schemings, but the Christian's ability to resist them
remains prominent. This inversion remains intact throughout
Lewis's story of the patient's efforts to retain grace until
it is turned upright in the last pages of the text. The last
chapter begins with Screwtape chiding Wormwood for
"let[ting] a soul slip through [his] fingers" (146). While
this chapter, like its predecessors, is narrated by
Screwtape, it represents a definite shift in Screwtape's
tone. The edge Screwtape's voice once contained is now
replaced with defeat as he laments, " H e got through so
easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no
nursing home [. . .] sheer, instantaneous liberation.
[. . .] One moment it seemed to be all our world [. . .]
next moment all this was gone [. . .]" (146). Lewis clearly
C ovak 71
declares a victor in the spiritual battle the text

documents. Through Screwtape's despairing tone (and the
patient's resistance of the devils' ploys), Lewis clearly
marks Screwtape and, more precisely, his ideology as the
conquered and, therefore, less preferable option.
Furthermore, as Screwtape recounts the patient's realization
that he can retain grace and so resist the devils' ploys,
the subject of grace is revisited. The discussion of grace
in Screwtape, however, is slightly different from the others
in this study. Instead of the moment being presented as it
is occurs in the text, Screwtape philosophizes on the moment
after it has already taken place. Consequently, the textual
examples of each step span the entirety of the text rather
than a finite portion of it. Moreover, the examples refer
not only to the singular patient in the text, but to all
humanity as well. Nevertheless, since Screwtape essentially
details the narrator's ruminations on how to avoid losing a
patient to heaven, a template of Screwtape's strategy for
distancing a patient from the opportunity for grace can be
extrapolated from his exchanges with Wormwood:
1. The devils must first bombard the patient with
tragedy in order to promote hopelessness and
complacency.
2. The devils must next become a component in the
C o v a k 72
patient's sense of self; that is, they must

influence his will without his knowledge.
3. The devils then foster habits that reinforce
the patient1s sinful nature.

4. Finally, the devils convince the patient that,
because of his sinful nature, grace is not a
viable option for him.
Screwtape reveals how devils complete the first step
when he discusses the disappointment they prey on: " It is
after men have given in to the irremediable [. . .] that the
dangers of humbled and gentle weariness begin. To produce
the best results from the patient's fatigue, therefore, you
must feed him false hopes'1 (141). The strain of life's
misfortunes and the emotional exhaustion they produce, lead
to the second step away from grace - becoming an integral
part of the patient's self. We observe this incorporation
not by direct statement, but through Screwtape's account of
the patient's response when the devils' presence is
revealed:
There was a sudden clearing of the eyes [. . .] as
he saw you [Wormwood] for the first time, and
recognized the part you had had in him and know
that you had it no longer. Just think [. . .] what
he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen
C ovak 73
from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a

hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off
for good [. . .] a defiled, wet, clinging garment.
(146)
It is clear the devil has become a part of the patient
without his knowledge: Screwtape notes how Wormwood is seen
" f o r the first time" as his part is "recognized."
Moreover, the presence of the devil is cumbersome: its
removal brings freedom from the pain of an old sore, from
the confinement of a " t e t t e r , " and from the weight of an
enveloping cloth.
Screwtape1s instructions on alienating the patient from
his emotions represent the third step in the process. By
encouraging the patient to disconnect action from the
feelings that prompt it (thereby protecting the patient's
tendency to indulge the sinful nature), the devils hope to
erode the patient's sense of feeling altogether until he
becomes completely consumed by his sinful nature. As
Screwtape notes, "[A]ctive habits are strengthened by
repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he
feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act,
and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel"
(61). The fourth and final step is exemplified by
Screwtape's comments on the patient's realization that he
Covak 74
has been deceived, that grace is indeed possible: " D i d you

mark how naturally - as if he'd been born for it - [he]
entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the
twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? [. . .] How could I ever

have doubted it? "(147). The presence of doubts implies the
patient harbors some questions of the legitimacy of his own
grace. Screwtape's frustration at the apparent ease with
which the patient arrives at his realization indicates he
has sought to implement the very doubts the patient has now
released. However, most worthy of noting is that, despite
the completion of each step in the move away from grace, the
patient still accepts grace. And, in this way more than any
other, Christianity emerges fully as the privileged ideology
in Screwtape.
Screwtape's letters invite the reader to journey into a
unique narrative experience. Lewis constructs a story that
has no marked dialogue to speak of and no recount of
conversations and philosophical discussions. Yet, within his
text, there are at least two voices - Screwtape's and
Lewis's - that work together to foreground the moment of
grace. This type of discourse shows the unique and complex
relationships between voices and ideologies, each expressing
meaning and intention unique to its form and function in the
narrative. Thus, Bakhtin's theory of double-voiced discourse
C o vak 75
is a useful tool for unlocking meanings in this text, for

analyzing the various interplays between author, character,
and narration, and, for answering perhaps the most pertinent
guestion of Bakhtinian theory: the guestion of who else is
speaking.
C ovak 76
CHAPTER 4
The voices of Grace in “Parker’s Back”
In a letter to a friend written in 1958, Flannery

O'Connor comments on the necessity of change through grace:
It seems to me that all good stories are about
conversion, about a character's changing [and]
[t]he action of grace that changes a character.
[. . .] Part of the difficulty of all this is that
you write for an audience who doesn't know what
grace is and don't recognize it when they see it.
(qtd. in Kinney 76-77)
The process of change that precedes the acceptance of grace
can be mistakenly underrated as a mere lead up to the moment
of grace itself; however, the process that precedes grace is
necessary for the acceptance of grace. Flannery O'Connor's
short story "Parker's Back" traces the protagonist's
journey toward grace and the inner struggle he must undergo
as he moves toward his moment of grace. O'Connor wrote the
story - her last - in May of 1964 during her final
hospitalization before her death a few months later (Orvell
172). With its rendering of her ever-present theme of
humanity's spiritual journey toward grace, "Parker's
Back," like "Revelation," continues in O'Connor's
tradition of combining violence and religion to create a
R eproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
C o v a k 77
text that speaks as much to humanity's need for grace as to

the consequences of refusing it. Also similar to
"Revelation" is O'Connor's choice of a misfit to be the
recipient of grace: in "Parker's Back" the misfit, Parker,
encounters the moment and, even more surprisingly, does so
instead of his dogmatic wife, Sarah Ruth. Beneath this
reversal of favor lies an underlying emphasis of process
over product: to some readers, Sarah Ruth, with her strict
adherence to the laws of religion, seems at first to be the
logical choice to fully embody grace. However, O'Connor
subverts our expectations by exposing Sarah Ruth's mock
Christianity and, instead, casts Parker as the authentic
representative of grace. His journey toward grace is a
process that requires he change from a spiritually empty
character to one unabashedly seeking God, and, in the end,
we see Parker as genuine and Sarah Ruth as false.
The plot progresses fairly simply: the protagonist,
Parker - a predominantly angry, discontent wanderer - meets
and marries Sarah Ruth Cates, who, according to Miles Orvell
in his book Flannery O' Connor: An Introduction, is " a
theologically approved character" whose constant remarks of
disapproval and predictions of damnation help launch
Parker's desperate search to discover his spiritual destiny
(167). One afternoon, while attending to some chores during
C ovak 78
work, Parker accidentally drives his tractor into a tree,

causing it to overturn and burst into flames. After he
avoids death by narrowly escaping the flames, Parker decides
to have a portrait of Christ tattooed over the whole of his
back in an effort to acquire God by incorporating Him into
his very flesh. Parker then races to show Sarah Ruth his
tattoo, thinking she will be pleased only to have her
respond by beating him mercilessly and banishing him from
the house for his idolatry. At the story's end, Parker
realizes that to attain grace, he must triumph both over the
conflict between his own inner voices and his constant need
for Sarah Ruth's approval. Parker's is a story about a
journey toward grace that is marked both by the events of
his own spiritual awakening and the devaluing of the false
Christianity embodied by Sarah Ruth. Consequently, while the
moment of grace is foregrounded in other O'Connor texts, in
this story, the events that transpire before the moment of
grace receive as much attention as the moment itself.
Parker's process of change is characterized by the
presence of two distinct voices that, together, comprise the
character, Parker. As with the different voices in Lewis's
The Screwtape Letters, these voices convey two distinct and
separate ideologies; this time, however, the voices come not
from two different characters, but from a single
C o v a k 79
protagonist. Each voice represents a different side to

Parker's self: his identity is divided, I suggest, into
these two voices that are engaged in a battle, the victor of
which will determine whether Parker accepts grace. For
clarity's sake, I shall refer to the voice that resists
grace as " O . E . , " and to the voice that pursues grace as
"Obadiah Elihue. " While O.E. is angry, desperate, and
rebels against God, Obadiah Elihue is introspective, gentle,
and seeks God. To rid himself of this conflict, Parker, like
the other characters discussed in this study, must make a
choice to accept grace; however, because of its two-voiced
process, Parker's movement toward grace is distinctive.
Therefore, instead of closely analyzing the moment itself as
I have done elsewhere, in this chapter I will focus instead
on the protagonist's journey toward that point. Furthermore,
because of her contribution to this process, I will analyze
Sarah Ruth and define the parameters of her role in Parker's
moment of grace. To do this, I will apply Bakhtin's concept
of character zones to scrutinize the language, setting, and
behavioral tendencies of the voices of O.E., Sarah Ruth, and
Obadiah Elihue. I will also explore how these voices
correspond to O'Connor's version of three distinct human
conditions that each represent a particular response to the
necessity of grace.
C o v a k 80
While not immediately apparent at the start of the

story, Parker is comprised of two competing voices. We first
meet Parker as he is pondering his reasons for marrying his
wife, Sarah Ruth. Almost immediately, we are made aware of
Parker's tendency to categorize others despite his inability
to assign meaning to himself. For example, he calls his wife
plain and ugly and comments that she is pregnant " a n d
pregnant women [are] not his favorite kind"; and, as the
narrator explains, " H e could account for her one way or
another; it was himself he could not understand11 (220).
Each new scene provides another element of Parker. He
displays his crudeness, for instance, through sexual
innuendo: when Sarah Ruth first comments on the themes of
his many tattoos, he winks and teases, " Y o u ought to see
the ones you can't see" (222). His penchant for body art is
another aspect of himself that Parker confesses leaves him
"filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the
flag passes" (223). However, through flashbacks, we begin
to see a different side to the protagonist. When they first
meet, Sarah Ruth asks Parker his name. When he tells her,
"O.E. Parker," she inquires what the initials stand for
and, " i n a reverent voice," Sarah Ruth repeats his answer:
Obadiah Elihue (229). Considering our focus on grace, it is
noteworthy that, according to Orvell, the name Obadiah means
C ovak 81
"worshiper of Jehovah" and Elihue means "whose God is H e 1'

(169). With the introduction of Obadiah Elihue, we encounter
another voice that communicates Parker's more emotional
side: it reveals how, for instance, upon seeing the image of
the Byzantine Christ, Parker's " heart began slowly to beat
again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle
power" (O'Connor 235). The interplay of Parker's two voices
constitutes his movement toward grace,
in Bakhtin’s Zone
In the section of his essay "Discourse in the Novel"
that discusses the implications of the many voices and
ideologies in social discourse, M.M. Bakhtin coins the term
"character zone," which he defines as the product of
"diffused authorial speech that encircles characters"
(316). He adds:
These zones are formed from the fragments of
character speech, from various forms for hidden
transmission of someone else's word, from
scattered words and sayings belonging to someone
else's speech [. . .]. Such a character zone is
the field of action for a character's voice,
encroaching in one way or another upon the
author's voice. (316)
C ovak 82
Admittedly, much of Bakhtin's application of this term is

aimed at the overlapping constructs of author and character
identity; however, for the purposes of this study, I confine
the scope of the term to its implications of character
assessment only. Building on Bakhtin's quote, I suggest a
three-part model of examination focusing on the language,
setting, and behavioral tendencies associated with each
voice. Moreover, O.E., Sarah Ruth, and Obadiah Elihue
correspond to O'Connor's versions of three different
approaches to the necessity of grace: hopeless unbelief,
overbearing dogmatism, and genuine seeking, which she
communicates, respectively, through the voices of O.E.,
Sarah Ruth, and Obadiah Elihue. These voices are associated
with three distinct character zones, and, by sorting out the
peculiar ways each voice articulates the three facets of
their character zones - language, setting, and behavioral
tendencies - we are able to delineate each voice and so
discover how they illuminate the spiritual struggle that
heralds Parker's acceptance of grace,
in o.E.’s zone
When considered together, the language, setting, and
behavioral tendencies of O.E.'s voice depict a character
whose search for redemption is handicapped by his
unwillingness to abandon the very self that necessitates
C ovak 83
grace; he is, in other words, the hopeless unbeliever. In a

pattern that establishes him as one entrapped by unutilized
opportunities to change, the voice of O.E. communicates
Parker's wavering between feeling an urgency to succumb to
grace and resisting its pull altogether. The discourse in
O.E.1s character zone, in particular, is full of profanity
and anger; for example, when he pretends to smash his hand
while working on a car engine, Parker hollers, " G o d dammit!
[. . .] Jesus Christ in hell! Jesus God Almighty damn! God
dammit to hell!" (221). In a similar fit of anger, Parker
drives into a tree exclaiming, "GOD ABOVE!" (232). Later,
when he discloses his given name, he threatens, " I f you
call me that aloud, I'll bust your head open" (229).
The setting of O.E's zone underscores Parker's
unwillingness to relinquish control. Parker frequents only
the places where he feels he has the most power: for
instance, at the tattoo parlor, he selects the image of
Christ and insists vehemently the artist leave it, "Just
like it is [. . .] just like it is or nothing" (235). If his
sense of power is threatened, he responds in anger: when the
local barflies mock his new tattoo, "Parker lunge[s] into
the midst of them [. . .] overturning] tables and swinging
fists [. . .]" (240). Parker's need to maintain control
extends even to his home: upon returning from the city,
C ovak 84
Parker commands, " S h u t your mouth [. . .] Look at this [the

tattoo of Christ] and then I don't want to hear no more out
of y o u 11 (243).
Expressed through the voice of O.E., Parker's feelings
toward God reveal the motives for his behavioral tendencies.
He seems always to be running from God; for example, when
his mother tries to take him to church, "he [sees] the big
lighted church [and] jerk[s] out of her grasp [. . .] The
next day he lied about his age and joined the navy" (224).
In other instances, Parker's attempts to escape are not
physical but verbal. When Sarah Ruth asks Parker if he's
saved, for example, " h e had replied that he didn't see
[there] was anything in particular to save him from" (229).
And, in a similar exchange, Parker responds to the
tattooist's question of " A r e you saved?" with " N a w
[. . .] I ain't got no use for none of that. A man can't
save his self from whatever it is he don't deserve none of
my sympathy" (238). This time, Parker avoids an encounter
with God by refusing to acknowledge he needs saving,
in Sarah Ruth’s zone

Sarah Ruth's is the voice of an overbearing dogmatist
who, as Orvell asserts, " h a s no real precedent [in
O'Connor's work] being a fanatically puritan fundamentalist,
born and bred in a briar patch" (167). Her voice
C o v a k 85
articulates an ideology that prioritizes adherence to dogma

that ultimately ” reject[s] Jesus in the name of religion"
(Ragen, par. 9). Furthermore, her constant criticism of
Parker leaves him with little happiness and even less
resolve: "Every morning he decided he had had enough and
would not return that night; [but] every night he returned"
(230).
Like O.E., Sarah Ruth is also trapped. She cannot
progress past the limitations of her dogmatism because she
does not see her conduct as judgmental, a condition
evidenced by her language and behavior, in particular. The
language of her zone most directly illustrates her misguided
fervor: in one scene, when Parker and Sarah Ruth are arguing
about his excessive number of tattoos, she declares, " A t
the judgment seat of God, Jesus is going to say to you,
'What you been doing all your life besides having pictures
drawn all over you?'11 (230). Her voice assumes a wrathful
tone with her use of the term "judgment seat of God, 11 a
phrase that brings to mind images of evaluation and
punishment. Her warning, "Jesus is going to say to you"
shows she even presumes to know the coming words of God.
Only moments later she adds another prediction in the same
presumptive fashion: "You're tempting sin [. . .] and at
the judgment seat of God you'll have to answer for that
C o v a k 86
too" (230). This passage demonstrates how Sarah Ruth's is a

rhetoric of damnation, of an unyielding judgment of right
and wrong based solely on the strictest interpretations of
the terms.
Considering her openly condemning and antagonistic
attitudes, it is surprising that the setting of Sarah Ruth's
zone is the home. While traditional notions of home are
associated with comfort and safety, Sarah Ruth's contradicts
such an idea with her "rigidly fanatic Bible read[ing] "
and "hatred of sin equal to her hatred of the Church" that
dominate her home atmosphere (Orvell 167). In another
reversal of its typical connotations, home as a nurturing
safe-haven is instead, for Parker, a place where he feels
"puzzled and ashamed of himself" (219). And, in a move
that solidifies home as Sarah Ruth's sphere of influence,
O'Connor repeatedly places her in domestic environments. For
example, when we first meet Sarah Ruth, she is standing
outside her mother's home, where she is living at the time.
Later, while sitting on the front porch floor snapping
beans, she ridicules Parker's employment by an older woman.
Perhaps in the most disturbing deviation from the
traditional sense of home, she batters Parker with a broom
on the stoop of their house.
C ovak 87
The beating scene at the story's end exemplifies Sarah

Ruth's unrelenting conformity to doctrine. When Parker,
expecting to finally please Sarah Ruth, shows her his tattoo
of Christ, he is dumbstruck by her reaction. In a fit of
rage, she blasts him as an idolater and attacks him

physically:
[S ]he grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him
across the shoulders with it.
Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there
and let her beat him until she had nearly knocked
him senseless and large welts had formed on the
face of the tattooed Christ. [. . .] She [. . .]
shook [the broom] to get the taint of him off it.
Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan
tree and her eyes hardened still more. (244)
While her cold reaction toward Parker's attempt to make her
happy certainly invites readers' sympathies, it is her
blatant refusal of mercy and compassion that solidifies our
sympathy for Parker. Despite her imperious deliveries of
Scripture, Sarah Ruth is devoid of the very love in which
that same Scripture finds its root. Instead of welcoming
him, Sarah batters Parker with a broom; rather than
apologizing for her vicious attack, she shakes his " t a i n t "
from the broom, implying Parker's blood is so foul, it
Covak 88
contaminates even a tool used to sweep dirt and debris.

Finally, in a final display of pitilessness, Sarah Ruth
looks on impassively while her husband stands broken and
bleeding only a few feet away.
Sarah Ruth's cruelty is a behavioral tendency that has
far-reaching implications for Parker's moment of grace. As
the self-proclaimed authority on what God will say, Sarah
Ruth is the only representation of God Parker has
encountered, but her constant damnations lead to feelings of
rejection and inadequacy; in fact, the narrator discloses,
"Parker did nothing much when he was at home but listen to
what the judgment seat of God would be like for him if he
didn't change his ways" (230-31). Before he can complete
his process of moving toward grace, Parker must learn to
conquer his need for Sarah Ruth's approval.
In obadiah Elihue's zone
Parker's survival of a life-threatening accident

permits the voice of Obadiah Elihue to emerge. The language,
setting, and behavioral tendencies of this voice depict a
progressively softening Parker who speaks with introspection
and exudes a gentle submission; even more noteworthy is that
the voice is heard only in settings that place Parker
outside the parameters of his own control. The tractor
accident is one such setting. The accident occurs when
C ovak 89
Parker, while baling hay, accidentally drives a tractor into

a tree. Thrown clear of the fire, Parker watches as the fire
blazes nearby:
The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly
being eaten by the fire; [. . .] he was not in
them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning
tree on his face. [. . .] He moved toward [his
truck] [. . . and] drove [. . .] straight for the
city [. . .] He only knew that there had been a
great change in his life, a leap forward into a
worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could
do about it. It was for all intents accomplished.
(233)
The accident allows Parker to realize the threat of hell,
and so he goes looking for God. Several features of the
passage support this idea. First, like the fires of hell,
the fire in the accident is consuming: Parker watches the
fire as it quickly " e a t s " his shoes and feels the fire
breathing on his face, as it threatens to devour him.
Furthermore, the narrator's observation that Parker was not
in his shoes is symbolic: while " h e was not in t h e m 1'
refers to Parker's feet not being physically in his shoes,
it also implies it is not Parker's destiny to go to hell.
Parker's immediate dash for the city (and the tattoo of
Covak 90
Christ) further supports an interpretation that has Parker

escaping, albeit narrowly, from both the fires of the
accident and the fires of hell.

The narration shifts in its tone here as the language
of the voice of Obadiah Elihue surfaces. The first
alteration occurs when Parker realizes his life has changed:
the words " h e only knew [. . .] there was nothing he could
do about it" carry a submissive tone not at all indicative
of O.E.'s voice. Moreover, Parker's admission that " i t [the
change] was for all intents accomplished" reflects a
willingness to admit his journey has reached a turning point
where his control has been usurped by another existing
outside of himself. This altered tone also extends to
Parker's reflections on Sarah Ruth. After the accident, each
time Parker mentions his wife, his language has softened;
instead of rebukes like " A w shut your mouth for a change,"
Parker "long[s] miserably for Sarah Ruth. Her sharp tongue
and icepick eyes were the only comfort he could bring to
mind" (220, 236).
When Parker adopts a vulnerable, submissive behavior,
the voice of Obadiah Elihue emerges. Not coincidentally,
these instances coincide with a new step toward grace: while
Parker sits in the alley after his moment of realization,
for example, it is the voice of Obadiah Elihue that says,
C ovak 91
" I t seemed to him that, all along, [. . .] he wanted to

please her" (241). And, in a moment that displays Parker's
vulnerability, Sarah Ruth dismisses Parker's pleas to look
at his back, he cries in the voice of Obadiah Elihue, " L o o k
at it! [. . .] Look at it! " (243). But there is one passage
where we hear the voice of Obadiah Elihue at a time when
Parker is both vulnerable and submissive, both to Sarah Ruth
and to God.
The passage in the story that recounts Parker's
attempts to gain admittance to his home after his return
from the city illustrates all three aspects of O.E.'s
character zone and, like the symbols of the parable did in
"Revelation," the passage's pattern of dialogue connects
O'Connor's text to the Bible. Its pattern of knocking and
asking as Parker is seeking God, is like that in Matthew
7.7-8, which reads, " A s k and it will be given to you; seek
and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to
him who knocks, the door will be opened" (New International
Version). The passage in "Parker's Back" is as follows:
A sharp voice close to the door said, "Who's
there?''
"Me," Parker said, " O . E . " [. . .]
"Me," he said impatiently, " O . E . "
C o v a k 92
Still no sound from inside.

He tried once more. " O . E . , " he said, bamming
the door two or three more times. "O.E. Parker.
You know me.11

There was a silence. Then the voice said
slowly, " I don't know no O.E.11 [. . .] Then as
he stood there, a tree of light burst over the
skyline. [. . .] The [. . .] voice said
peremptorily, "Who's there I ast you?" [. . .]
"Obadiah Elihue!" he whispered.
The door opened and he stumbled in. (242-43)
When Parker finds the door to his house locked and his
renewed hope for acceptance dashed, he asks for admittance
to Sarah Ruth or, more accurately, to the God she at first
seems to represent. But he asks in the voice of O.E., he
chooses the wrong voice that reflects the wrong motives. The
voice of O.E. has no real interest in accepting grace; he
seeks only to escape his inner turmoil and shows no genuine
interest in knowing or accepting God. O.E. is the voice
Parker uses to try to force his way through the door and,
consequently, he is denied. Only when the voice of the text
asks "Who's there?" for the final time does Parker
whisper, "Obadiah Elihue," and "[t]he door opened and he
stumble[s] in" (243). Notably, O'Connor does not mention to
Covak 93
whom the mysterious voice in the text belongs. While it at

first seems obvious the voice is that of Sarah Ruth, a
closer examination reveals no such identification occurs;
instead, O'Connor refers to it only as "the voice." Its
ambiguous description leaves the question of the identity
behind the voice open for many interpretations. Of course,
given the ideology at work in her fiction, the most likely
rendering suggests the voice is, in fact, God awarding grace
to Obadiah Elihue.
The Journey Toward Grace

In the other texts highlighted in this study, the
moment of grace, and not any specific feature leading to it,
is unarguably the climax of the text. In "Parker's Back,"
however, the process is emphasized: Parker's moment is not
even foregrounded. Instead it is the culmination of a
process consisting of three distinct occurrences in the
text. In another deviation from the pattern of the other
texts, Parker's process is not contained in a single passage
of the story; rather, it is reflected at the tattoo parlor,
in the alley behind the bar, and outside his house. The
first event - Parker's conversation with the artist at the
tattoo parlor - signifies Parker's initial attempt to
connect with God, which leaves him unsatisfied and
incomplete:
C ovak 94
"Wh o are you interested in?11 he [the artist]

said, "saints, angels, Christs, or what?"
" G o d , 11 Parker said.
"Father, Son, or Spirit?"
" J u s t God, 11 Parker said
impatiently. "Christ. I d o n ’t care. Just so
it's God.” (O'Connor 234)
In his search for God, Parker does not rush to a church to
talk to a minister - a setting in which grace is commonly
situated; instead, he speeds to a tattoo parlor and demands
the tattooist etch an image of Christ on his back. Parker
seems confused about exactly who God is - a strong
indication this cannot be his moment of grace. When the
tattooist asks him if he's interested in saints, angels, or
Christs, Parker answers simply " G o d , " as if the generic
term is his safest option. The extent of this confusion is
exposed by his next answer: when questioned about his
preferences within the Trinity, he snaps "Just God,"
another indication he thinks the broadest label is the best.
Moreover, because he declares " I don't care," Parker

indicates his indifference to the details of the image and,
more significantly, to the nuances of his own perception of
God, revealing a lack of a genuine desire to know God. In an
ironic twist, the seedy tattoo artist with his supply of
C o v a k 95
names and categories, seems to know more about who God is

than Parker. Notably, Parker's moment passes without a hint
of transformation or even a slight alteration in behavior.
After he squanders his opportunities to ask about the
various facets of God's, identity, Parker leaves the tattoo
parlor in search of his wife's favor: a move that signifies
he is yet to realize that an acceptance of grace means he
needs only God's approval, not m a n 's . This incomplete moment
leaves the reader looking for fulfillment in other places in
the text.
In a discussion of "Parker's Back," Orvell contends,
"O'Connor enforces a peculiar amalgam of literal physical
detail and symbolic meaning. Thus, as the tattoo sinks into
Parker's skin, the transformation - or second birth -
begins'•( 168). Orvell's borrowing of the term "second
birth" brings to mind Jesus' instruction to Nicodemus in
John 3: " [N]o one can see the kingdom of God unless he is
born again" (New International Version). Once Parker has the
finished tattoo on his back, it is as though he has
undergone his second birth, which in turn signifies his
acceptance of grace. Nevertheless, Parker still feels the
need for Sarah Ruth's approval.
While Parker waits for the artist to finish the tattoo,
his thoughts turn to Sarah Ruth:
C o v a k 96
He lay there, imagining how Sarah Ruth would be

struck speechless by the face on his back and
every now and then this would be interrupted by a
vision of the tree of fire and his empty shoe
burning beneath it. (238)
Thus, in Parker's mind, Sarah Ruth must accept his newfound
grace (symbolized by his tattoo) if he is to elude the fires
of hell (symbolized by the burning tree); consequently,
Parker wastes no time in showing Sarah Ruth the tattoo,
in the zone of Grace

With the tattoo of Christ now emblazoned on his back,
Parker arrives at his door ready to finally receive the
acceptance he has been longing for. After he utters the name
Obadiah Elihue, he " a l l at once [feels] the light pouring
through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect
arabesque of colors [. . (243). The incorporation of
light and nature metaphors - two often-used signs to
foreshadow spiritual transformation - indicates Parker has
reached his moment of grace. Yet, one matter of textual and
theological significance must be resolved.
As we've explored, throughout the story, Parker
continuously seeks the approval of his wife not because he
loves or even likes her, but because she is signifies
acceptance from God. At the story's end, any possibility -
C o v a k 97
however slight it might be - that Sarah Ruth's nature has

even a small piece of a legitimate love for God disappears
entirely; as Orvell puts it, when he presents the image on
his back to his wife, "Parker painfully discovers that
Sarah Ruth does not recognize 'God' when he is pictured
right before her eyes. The word, for his wife, is
disembodied. It is not 'with God'1' (169). This realization
removes Sarah Ruth from her superior position over Parker,
and this is significant because it makes way for another
interpretation of the story's violent ending.
The last line of the story reads: "There he was - who
called himself Obadiah Elihue - leaning against the tree,
crying like a baby" (244). Prom this rather open-ended
conclusion, one of two possible interpretations may be
favored. The first is that, defeated and rejected, Parker
breaks down in despair without ever fully realizing his
desire to attain redemption through grace. The second
option, and I believe the more viable one, is that, by
subverting the facade of Sarah Ruth's authority, O'Connor
reconfigures the end's meaning; that is, after Sarah Ruth's
phoniness is unveiled, her pummeling of Parker seems more of
an attack on a genuine knowledge of God and less of a
victory over Parker's bewildered sense of self. This
interpretation shows Parker to be the hero of grace who
C o v a k 98
survives physical suffering to achieve a new humility in
Christ.
The protagonist in "Parker's Back" is comprised of
two distinct voices that function as dialogic manifestations
of an inner spiritual struggle. The voice of O.E. wants only
to escape the feeling of urgency that plagues him as he
flees from both God and the grace He offers. The voice of
Obadiah Elihue, however, is a genuine seeker whose pursuit
of God results in a physical confrontation that leaves him

broken but redeemed in the end. This analysis is grounded in
Bakhtin's notion of character zone, which provides a basis
for examining how o.E is the voice of hopeless unbelief and
how Obadiah Elihue is the voice of genuine seeking. This
theory is also gives insight into the character of Sarah
Ruth, Parker's legalistic, haughty wife, who, through her
concern more with doctrinal rules than with compassion,
represents a prioritization of works over faith. Parker's
authentic moment of grace involves the realization that
God's acceptance abides not in man (Sarah Ruth) but in Him
alone. Through this revelation, Parker emerges as humbly
broken recipient of grace who truly exemplifies O'Connor's
assertion that, indeed, " a l l good stories are about
conversion, about a character's changing" (gtd. in Kinney
76) .
C ovak 99
Conclusion
For the purposes of this study, I've defined grace as

the state of being in relationship with God that results
from a process of realizing that we are sinners and of
consciously choosing to accept G o d 's forgiveness. My

specific interests lie in how grace is conveyed through
narrative. Flannery O'Connor and C.S. Lewis's fiction
presents the various ways people encounter and accept grace.
By examining grace in light of the precise moment it is
accepted (or rejected) as well as the process that precedes
it, our sense of grace ceases to be that of a narrowly
framed occurrence that is only accessible to particular
people at particular times. Taken together, these texts
demonstrate how a variety of people can experience grace in
a wide range of circumstances. This is significant to any
discussion of grace if it is to be viewed as a choice
readily available to any person who desires - even
ambivalently - to meet with God. O'Connor and Lewis do much
to reinforce this variety; although neither offers the
complete picture of grace as I've defined it, when
juxtaposed, their individual renderings come together to
construct a rich picture of the experience of the moment of
grace and the process that precedes it.
Covak 100
Both still center on the three distinct components of

my definition and depict this combination of realization,
decision, and transformation both as a singular, defining
moment and as a process, which can be even further
complicated by the specific genres, narrative structures,
and voices used. I began this study by concentrating on the
interpolated narrative of parable in O'Connor's short story
"Revelation" because it eases us into a discussion of
grace with its relatively obvious departure from the main
narrative. Mrs. Turpin also exemplifies O'Connor's most
standard recipient of grace: she is not overly likable with
her racist remarks and apparent ignorance of the extent of
her own hypocrisy. However, with the exception of her
racism, I don't see that she is much different from the
typical reader who might encounter O'Connor's work. Are we
not all hypocritical in some way, however small or large it
might be? And are we not, as the verse in Matthew 7 points
out, ready to call attention to the speck of sawdust in
another's eye while we ignore the plank in our own? Mrs.
Turpin is particularly interesting - as is Parker in
"Parker's Back" for the same reason - because, by their
stories' ends, we are curiously drawn to characters who are
initially unsympathetic. Somehow, their very need for grace
Covak 101
and their eventual acceptance of it redeems them for the
reader.
The interpolated narrative of myth in Lewis1s The Great
Divorce moves us into a different genre but keeps the same
narrative structure: instead of centering on the moment of
grace in isolation, Divorce, with the help of its vignettes,
illustrates multiple ways people encounter their moments of
grace. By touching on so many possibilities for how the
moment of grace may be received, we again see a variety in
the kinds of people to whom grace pertains. And, as he
similarly does in The Screwtape Letters, Lewis reiterates
the importance of choice when considering how grace should
be presented in literature. In both of his texts, Lewis
constructs multiple opportunities for his characters to make
what constitutes a small decision that has much larger
implications: when, for example, the patient decides with
what friends he'll spend time, Lewis uses Screwtape's
perspective on the dangers of falling prey to negative
influences to demonstrate how such a seemingly unimportant
decision can, in fact, have great consequences. This is
significant because it shows Lewis's belief in free will.
The aspects of grace O 'Connor's work explores are
equally indicative of the need for choice. But, especially
in "Parker's Back," O'Connor adds an interesting twist to
Covak 102
the question of choice: what happens when you want grace but
cannot seem to attain it or are rejected when you have it?
Parker has three moments that bring him progressively closer
to attaining grace, but, in the end, he is battered by the
wife whose adherence to religious law was once the only
example of grace he knew. For Parker, the answer to the
question might appear to be that grace is never truly
attainable and, if it is, the cost of accepting it is too
high. However, it seems more reasonable to me to instead
glean from Parker's story that grace is something one must
attain entirely apart from reliance on other people. The
ending to "Parker's Back'' is disconcerting, but it is also
necessary. Parker's long-fostered spiritual dependency on
Sarah Ruth has to be severed if he is to ever truly
experience grace, which I believe he does in the end.
Perhaps most ironically, I categorize "Parker's Back" with
the darker stories O'Connor has written because of the
startling images of its ending; however, most critics
consider it one her lightest, citing its subtle humor and
ironies as support for their contention that O'Connor was,
in a rare occurrence, just having fun.
The narratives of Flannery O'Connor and C.S. Lewis
ultimately address the larger issues of identity and
questions of spiritual destiny that, at some point, we all
Covak 103
consider. Their stories are a journey toward conversion that

mark the changes we must undergo and the decisions we must
make as we encounter our moment of grace: their stories are
narratives of grace.
C ovak 104
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enriching experience. I am thankful for Dr. Clay Nunnally's

Like so many of our best ideas, the pairing of Flannery

Born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, Flannery

its interest, that O'Connor chose the genre of the novel to

difficult to take his religious predicament seriously"

preparing them to accept their moment of grace" (Mystery

Which brings us to the question of O'Connor's

constantly reconsider our religious values and assess our

crisis that reveals to him his haughty and willful

water-colored maps and pictures to illustrate them (Mills

faith" since by "knowing the attitudes, the feelings, the

example - are representatives of the critical discourse he

his early atheism to his later depictions of hell to his

of the foundation for his arguments, so intense expansion of

preface to The Great Divorce, Lewis summarizes a spiritual

of grace through the use of Biblical form and symbolism.

The Screwtape Letters. Through a close inspection of the

through the voice of a devil, a move that, I suggest, at

The Parable of Grace in “Revelation”

A story whose focus rests on the moment its protagonist

the classes of people were moiling and

Turpin's moment of grace.

instruction of the lesson at hand. Indeed, the similarities

than a temporal one. If, as Bible scholar Dominic Crossan

delineating the temporal and eternal worlds through the

some Christian worship of lifting hands in surrender

For clarity's sake, I will discuss the contents of this

The Narrative structure

parable: because of their deviation from the norms the frame

parable, for instance.

interpolated narrative possessing its own setting,

Symbolism in the Parable

O'Connor employs Biblical symbolism to reveal the

symbolizes a move toward grace for, as Christian doctrine

allegiance with worldly riches shall not be judged as having

are actually not virtues at all. Instead, they are

Arguably, O'Connor includes these critical aspects to

But what change does Mrs. Turpin undergo as a result of

meet. The opening pages of the story portray Mrs. Turpin as

In an ironic play on assumptions, the interpolated

any doctrinal equivalent [. . .] It is the image that is the

narrative form through which she depicts the dramatic moment

humans accept that grace.

The Mythic world of Grace in The G re a t D iv o rc e

Of the power of literature, C.S. Lewis once said,

and novelist - as "the Teacher" who guides the narrator

dream that ultimately details one human's journey toward

of grace in Divorce by applying a template of the necessary

" windows11 that depict various spiritual vices such as

imagination in the Myth

Lewis's definition of myth most succinctly summarized

grace and thus fulfill Lewis's purpose, namely to introduce

falling on human imagination" which enables man

Screwtapes and Lewis's voice and analyze how the latters