The world of literature is full of themes and ideas for people to be taught how to behave in different situations under different circumstances. Literature helps to live correctly, on the whole, due to the accumulated experience of human beings at different epochs. This paper urges us to work out the theme of people’s indifference toward others on the examples of two short stories by Flannery O’Connor and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Their works The Displaced Person and No One Writes To The Colonel, respectively, demonstrate negative features of peoples’ characters hidden inside and having nothing with a natural and highly expressed power of soul and spirit. These authors were intended to write such a suchlike story to illustrate the sadness and sorrow of those who are left outside the boundaries of the communities or society. The authors’ manner of depicting details is extensively represented due to different stylistic devices and language, making stories easy to read. The only thing that contrasts both authors is their artistic work’s time prospects and backgrounds. These stories are similar in the idea, but they saved originality with both authors’ distinctive features.
Flannery O’Connor is a great author who maintains the sense of what she wants to deliver to a reader from the very words of the title. The theme of displacement is relatively highly represented in the novel. The characters’ structure and the manner with which the author contemplates hidden negativism of two women who can perceive the world with the right intentions, but5 a lack of spiritual background does not let them admit one more person whom they displaced with pleasure.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez likewise depicts a story that displays a coloring of sorrow from the very title because of the indifference of society and people toward a noble and honored man, the ColonelColonel. The theme of sadness is emphasized when this man gets mainly accustomed to a routine of dressing every morning to meet with mail about pension prescriptions, but no one even writes or delivers something to him.
In O’Connor’s novel, Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre displaced Mr. Guizac, not even understanding that they were previously replaced on their farm and neglected by the community and inside their flow of thinking. Douglas Robillard, in his book, strives to outline the following fact: “First the Shortly, the family of white farm workers, are displaced” (Robillard 36). Mrs. McIntyre, on the other hand, strives to manage affairs in a way that is more appropriate to her. She does not even stop stating that people around her are needful for her due to her personal primitive needs. She never wants to give back her attention, acknowledgment, pride, etc. “Mrs. McIntyre also sees the land, the world’s body, as an extension of herself; she asserts time and again, “This is my place” (O’Connor 314), as though her utterance of the words will establish the undisputed truth of the statement” (Gordon 181).
The same motives are seen in the novel by Marquez. The form of the story presupposes the life of the ColonelColonel, who is in his mid-seventies. Along with his wife, he does not know how to make their living supported with money because the ColonelColonel was waiting for his pension, but he was upset with the news every time. The only thing which provides him with a kind of soul equilibrium is a fighting cock with which his dead son presented him. With constantly growing hunger and mourning of the wife, the ColonelColonel still believes to be given with a letter and pension in it. The tragedy incorporates the fact that the period of such waiting is rather long, 15 years. Julio Ortega, in his Transatlantic Translations, describes the feelings with which Marquez wrote his novella:
In No one Writes to the ColonelColonel (1958), Marquez produces a parable of reading as an enigma of social and political history. Faith in the remote code of a victorious authority supports ColonelColonel, a tragic reader, believing in the truth of the letter, with only the fighting cock that belonged to his dead son as an emblem of an illegible chance (Ortega 174).
Fighting cock symbolizes the hope that the ColonelColonel had during his grinding poverty (PĂ©rez and Aycock 61). The ColonelColonel believes that he is not alone, but in reality, the people of his country have forgotten about him. The theme of hope is raised by the author higher than the theme of humanity. Selling a fighting cock due to the wife’s stubbornness and insistence, the ColonelColonel gives up before the precise cruelty of the world in which he lives. It is like a man who, in despair and due to someone’s weakness, stops at the halfway.
Returning to The Displaced Person, Flannery O’Connor makes the theme of indifference and selfishness, which is apparent in the story using an artistic manner to display the narrator’s attitude toward the foolishness and urge for profits from the side of Mrs. McIntyre, who, as the writer notes, was envious and primitive in own reasoning. “What she had thought of was the angel over the judge’s grave” (McVeigh & Schnapp 143). Mr. Guizac is displayed in the story as one of those outsiders who are excellent in personal traits of character and ability to work but were rejected by those who think of their excluding position in society. The theme of racial impatience is underlined in the novel by O’Connor providing multiple moments concerned with Negro people. All in all, the family of Shortly, Mrs. McIntyre and Mr. Guizac are those human beings who are displaced, in fact, but on different stages. Their displacement reminds us of the sorrowful destiny of the ColonelColonel in Marquez’s novel.
Both novels show people’s indifference and demonstrate the well-known proverb “dog eat dog” in the example of Mr. Guizac and the ColonelColonel. The theme of solitude and forlornness is those stimuli that should make readers evaluate people’s cruel intentions and convince them to dominate people’s negative characteristics throughout time prospects and place of living. One should not estimate novels as just one more example of a sad and true story, but to take out the message which can be helpful for everyone living in the society and along with people. A man is nothing unless they have some amenities and money. This philosophy of life is realized in the work of Marquez and supported using O’Connor’s remarks in her book.
Works cited
Corbett, Bob. No One Writes to the Colonel. London: Picador. 2001.
Gordon, Sarah. Flannery O’Connor: the obedient imagination. Atlanta. University of Georgia Press, 2003.
McVeigh, Daniel, and Schnapp, Patricia. The best American Catholic short stories: a Sheed & Ward collection. Lanham, MD. Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Ortega, Julio. Transatlantic translations: dialogues in Latin American literature. London. Reaktion Books, 2006.
PĂ©rez, Janet, and Aycock, Wendell M. Climate and literature: reflections of environment. Houston. Texas Tech University Press, 1995.
Robillard, Douglas. The critical response to Flannery O’Connor. NY. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.