Double Personality or a Really Good Actor?

Up until the last page of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by Flannery O’Connor, I was under the impression that Tom Shiftlet was a nice, hard-working man who had already seen too much bad in the world. He seemed to enjoy the little beauties in life, like watching the sunset and talking with new friends. When he first started working for the Craters, I assumed that he needed a place to stay, and he wanted to be able to help these people out. The old woman seemed to think that too. He worked hard and even taught the daughter a word (significant because she had never spoken before).

Even the things he said seemed to go along with his “first” (or “faked”) personality. He told the women that he had never married because he couldn’t find “an innocent woman today.” “He had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.” These words led me to believe that Shiftlet was a good, decent man in a world where there weren’t any. When he married the daughter, I thought even better of him because he was willing to deal with her problems…then came the incident in the diner.

When his wife, the younger Lucynell Crater, fell asleep in the diner on the way to their honeymoon, Shiftlet told the worker that she was a hitchhiker, and he couldn’t wait for her to wake up. Then he left her there. Amazingly enough, he picked up an actual hitchhiker later on and started a speech on how his mother was an amazing woman, and God took her from him. At this point, I had lost faith in Tom T. Shiftlet. To me, he was a really good actor who used the two women for his gain—getting a car (with all the parts to fix it up paid for). In the second to last paragraph, there was a line that made me even more disgusted by Shiftlet. “Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. He raised his arm and let if fall again to his breast. ‘Oh Lord!’ he prayed. ‘Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” That’s ridiculous. If he wanted the slime washed from the earth, he would be gone to because he’s part of it.

By the end of the story, it was easier to tell what kind of man he actually was. I looked back to the beginning and began to see some foreshadowing for an event like this. First off, his name was a clue. Shiftlet. It sounds a little shifty to me. He continually asked the old woman for money to fix up the car. But what would the two women need the car for? They had gotten along without it well enough before. Finally, he tried to squeeze every last cent from the old woman for the honeymoon…but really for himself. It says he “was deeply hurt by the word ‘milk.’” That seems suspicious because he was actually trying to milk her. Maybe he was hurt by that word because he didn’t want to appear so obvious.

Basically, Tom T. Shiftlet was a good actor. He was a man who could charm women out of their money no matter how despicable he had to be to get it. I’m sorry I ever fell for his act at the beginning of the story with all the foreshadowing and warning signals O’Connor was laying out.