Mans dark past Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Mans dark past - Essay Example This paper explores this literature by focusing on three short stories to determine the significance of literature in illuminating on the shadowy plane of humanity. Good Men Are Hard To Find In â€Å"Good men are hard to find† the author initially portrays a horror story, but in the end it becomes a religious tale in which there is a determination of how good and evil are distinguished. The story is seen through a grandmothers’ point of view, the lead character in the story. She represents the old generation who are religious, and is tormented by the modern world, and thus, hard to please in any way. Every person around her appears to be flawed as she says that they lack respect or just because they are tired of dealing with her high expectations. However, what the grandmother does not realize is that her old judging ways were also flawed, for if she stopped dwelling in the past and opened her eyes to life realities she could have saved the whole family from the misfit. Therefore, the title of the story is the representative of the grandmother’s assertion of then changed society, and this is evident when Red Sam’s wife states; â€Å"It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust†¦ And I don’t count nobody out of that, not anybody, as she is looking at her husband† (O’Connor 370). Therefore, the story has more to just a family going for a vacation away from home, for it contains prefigures that allude to the conclusion of the story. This is depicted in the conversations of characters, especially the grandmother and children’s mother whom have been used as symbols of the old and the new to bring out lessons to the human kind (DiYanni, 322). This show how good and evil has continued to have a never ending battle through the eyes of O’Connor. Greasy lake The second short story â€Å"Greasy Lake† is characterized by rape, death, alcohol and drugs all of which ar e attributes held by the bad boys in the story (Walker, 257). The main character who is the author begins the story by the description and that of his friends as a bad character. This is depicted in the way they dress: â€Å"we wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouth, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine† (Walker, 250). Therefore, in as much as the narrator has described the greasy lake to be a dangerous place, it is where they chose to spend their days and late nights just to be termed as bad boys (Boyle, 130). However, as it turns out, this lake seems to be a symbol that is used to convey the deterioration of morals in the society. This is because as the narrator says, the current waters of the lake were not the same as in the past, which made the Indians who were the original inhabitants of the place name it Wakan in reference to the clarity of its waters. Therefore, this change of waters from the time of Indians a s clear to murky is a sure enough example to communicate the corruption of the current morals of the societal context. The lake symbolizes the decadence in morals, especially the youth culture. This is a depiction of how man can only look back into his history to derive lessons. This is so because during the time the Native Americans lived there, they took care of the