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Literary Devices
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—Rural Southern Dialect:
Whenever the Misfit speaks, O’Connor changes her spelling and grammar, her attempt to capture the dialect of an uneducated person living in the rural South in the mid-20th century. The following passage—in which the Misfit shares pieces of his life story with the grandmother and her family while holding them at gunpoint—captures O’Connor’s use of dialect:
“I was a gospel singer for a while,” The Misfit said. “I been most everything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet.”
Here O’Connor does her best to capture the way that an uneducated person in the rural South would speak. She does this by changing the spelling of certain words—“armed service” becomes “arm service,” “twice” becomes “twict,” and “once” becomes “oncet”—as well as employing a more informal use of grammar—“I’ve been” becomes “I been” and “burned alive” becomes “burnt alive.”
It is notable that O’Connor does not modify the other characters’ speech patterns. This is her way of denoting that the family at the center of the story is educated and from a higher social class than the Misfit and his cronies (which also comes across in the Misfit’s listing of all the working-class jobs he has had). By highlighting the class differences between these characters, O’Connor encourages readers to notice the different assumptions they have about the characters, and ultimately undermines them by showing that every character, regardless of class, is capable of being both “good” and “bad.” Even the Misfit—who decides to kill the grandmother and her whole family—demonstrates a moment of regret (and therefore goodness) afterward.
Related Themes:
