Greenleaf

? GREENLEAF
In her story, “Greenleaf”, the author Flannery O’Conner
shows us that people can sometimes blind their factual vision of the
world through a mask of dreams, so that they would not be able to
make a distinction between reality and their dreams of reality. O’Conner
unveils this through the use of point of view , character, irony, and
symbol.

Being told through the limited omniscient point of view, this
story takes place on a dairy farm, which was the only thing left to Mrs.
May when her husband died. Mrs. May is a strong willed mother of
two, who has many dreams and goals. She is “barely making ends
meet”, as quoted from the story, through her dairy farm selling her
milk. She lives at the farm, since that is the only thing she has, with
her two sons Wesley, the younger child, and Scofield.
Though Mrs. May was struggling, her two boys never helped
or even supported her. They just lived with her and complained about
it. Both of the boys have a career of their own. Wesley is described as
a thin, bald, intellectual who did not like anything. He drove twenty
miles everyday to a second-rate university where he taught, which he did
not like. Now his brother Scofield is the total opposite of Wesley, it is
said that the only thing they did have in common was neither cared
about what happened to the farm. Scofield was a business man, he sold
insurance, not just any insurance but he sold insurance that only
Negroes bought. He was known as the “policy man” by the black
community. His mother was very disgruntled by this fact, knowing this
he would loudly shout to company that he was the “best negroe-
insurance salesman in the country”. Neither of the boys were married,
but Scofield would tease Mrs. May by saying that when she died he
would get married to a nice fat girl like Mrs. Greenleaf that would take
over the farm. So upon hearing this, Mrs. May changed her will so that
if the boys married they cold not leave the farm to their wives.

Now Mrs. Greenleaf was a fat, dirty woman who did not
take care of care of her family nor her house. She was one of the
neighbors close by and the wife of her employee, Mr. Greenleaf. Mrs.
Greenleaf would spend all of her time doing “prayer healing”. That is,
taking clippings of bad stories out of the paper and burring them in the
woods. She would then do some ritual over them. Her husband worked
for Mrs. May and was always had to be told more than once to do
something before he would actually do it.

The conflicts of this story was mostly man vs man and man
vs nature. Throughout most of the story there is a bull roaming around
the farm eating the shrubbery and taunting the animals. Later in the
story we discover that the owner of the bull is actually the Greenleafs’
boys, O.T. and E.T., who lives at a nice farm that was partially provided
by the government because they were sergeants in the army. They let the
bull go because it smashed up their truck and then ran away. Mrs. May
tries to get O.T. and E.T. to come pick up their bull, but they never
show.
The turning point of the story is when Mrs. May orders Mr.
Greenleaf to shoot his sons’ bull. Now when he’s told to do this he tries
to avoid it, but Mrs. May practically forces him to go out and hunt the
bull. She drives him out to where the bull is and orders him to chase
the bull out away from the herd of cows and to shoot it.

The Denouement, or climax, is when he chases the bull up to
where Mrs. May is waiting by her car. Now when she sees the bull, she
just stares at it with no sense of time or distance as it plows into her.
When this happens Mr. Greenleaf shoots it four times through the eye.
When the bull descended, Mrs. May was still stuck to its horns making
it appear that she was bending down