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"The Displaced Person"

"I am not responsible for the world's misery" (315).
Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person" (1955)

 

Points for Reflection

Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person" (1955), 485-500

  1. The peacock, which did not appear at all in an earlier version of this story, struts about the dairy farm to what end?  Why does O’Connor include this bird, and what do her characters’ responses to the bird’s presence reveal about them?
  2. Why might Mr. Guizac shrug so often?
  3. When the Priest claims "'He came to redeem us'" (317), of whom is he speaking?
  4. Would it be appropriate to characterize Mrs. Shortley as religious?
  5. What appears to motivate the actions of the eighty-year-old priest?
  6. Why does Mrs. McIntyre wear a nice dress and necklace to great the émigrés recently arrived from Poland? Does her attitude towards the displaced family change over the course of the story?
  7. Trace Mrs. Shortley’s shifting opinions about the displaced family; what triggers each change?
  8. What precipitates Mr. Shortley’s adoption of his wife’s prejudices towards the Guizacs?
  9. How does the final "vision" of Mrs. Shortley (305, 318) differ from those that precede it (291, 300, 301-302)?
  10. What type of value system does Mrs. McIntyre use to justify her actions throughout this story?
  11. Is Mrs. McIntyre’s dream (322) in any way prescient?
  12. Which characters encounter circumstances that force them to understand what it's like to be displaced?
  13. Which voices deploy the words "negro," "n-gger," and "colored person"? What does this suggest about O'Connor' s own posture towards each of these words?
  14. Wy does Flannery O'Connor allow so many of her characters in this story to speak truths aloud, then remain ignorant of these truths' applications to themselves?
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  16. Do any of these characters encounter circumstances that force them to interrogate their own xenophobia and/or racism?
  17. consider the symbolic function of the ubiquitous peacock on Mrs. McIntyre's farm.


An arch and several buildings and the sky is a greenish blue color
On Paranoiac Critical Town (1936)
oil on canvas
Salvador Dalí



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu