Grace and Epiphany in O’Connor and Guare
When we reach the end of A Good Man Is Hard To Find and "Six Degrees of Separation" there is a dissonance that leaves us with the sense that there should have been more, that there is unfinished business. A Good Man Is Hard To Find ends with the violent murder of a genteel, elderly woman, and "Six Degrees of Separation" simply fades away from Ouisa’s face to the rotating Kandinsky. Both endings occur immediately following epiphanic moments, which leaves a restlessness about "Why did that have to happen?" (in A Good Man Is Hard To Find) and "What happens now?" (in "Six Degrees of Separation"). We impulsively want an explanation for (what appears to be) useless violence in O’Connor’s story, and why we do not find out if Ouisa goes to save Paul in Guare’s. That both authors end their stories in this fashion leaves us looking for significance in this decision. The significance lies in the epiphanies experienced by characters in both stories, crystalline moments of grace that come to the grandmother, The Misfit, and Ouisa.
In A Good Man Is Hard To Find, the grandmother is a figure that has no pure human relationship; the family finds her a constant annoyance, and so do we. She is manipulative, overbearing, and selfish, all while striving to maintain her Southern gentility. Because of her own selfish desires, the family’s tragedies mount as the story progresses, culminating in their murder. The Misfit is also a character who avoids community, except in his case he purposefully avoids communion with others as a result of personal reflection. From the beginning of the story the grandmother and The Misfit seem destined to meet one another, and through O’Connor’s darkly humorous twists, the grandmother’s own manipulative actions bring her face to face with the man she fears most.
Bailey curses his mother after she recognizes the man before them as The Misfit, and the grandmother begins to cry. "‘Lady,’ (The Misfit) said, ‘don’t get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you thataway.’" (Reader, 2107) The Misfit reassures her, filling the role of a "good man" and more specifically a good son. The lines between good and evil, family and criminal, have begun to blur, and continue to do so as Bailey is led into the woods by Hiram. "‘Bailey Boy!’ the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her." (Reader, 2108) The Misfit has spoken as a son should, and now the grandmother calls the name of her own son while staring into the face of The Misfit. The association comes to a climax as The Misfit dons Bailey’s yellow shirt with the bright blue parrots. It is at this point that the grandmother invokes the name of Jesus, and we learn why she and The Misfit, who have grown closer by the moment, ultimately cannot come together without a clash: The Misfit has made the conscious decision not to believe in Jesus because Jesus "threw everything off balance." Because he was not there to verify Jesus’ claim, The Misfit has had no choice but to rationalize for himself an alternative life, the pleasure of which is found in "meanness."
The grandmother invokes religion as her strongest attempt to "convert" The Misfit from his evil, but her pleas to his "good blood" fall on deaf ears. In her desperate words and actions is the same attempt at manipulation that she has used successfully on Bailey and the family. This time it falls flat, yet O’Connor provides a positive twist, providing the grandmother with an opportunity to transcend her past ineptitude and come to a moment of clear vision. This moment occurs near the end of the story, just after the rest of the family has been taken into the woods and shot.
It is precisely at the instant when the grandmother appears to have lost all her reason that she and the The Misfit are brought together. The Misfit is disturbed by his inability to reconcile with Jesus, and is unable to commune with the tragic figure of the grandmother because he has already made a world for himself apart from the one she feebly attempts to "sell" him. This does not mean, however, that her pleas for him to pray disappear without impact. The grandmother introduced the topic of Jesus, and The Misfit is visibly frustrated by the "balance" disturbed by Jesus’ claims, working himself into such a state that his voice cracks with emotion. It is at that point that the grandmother touches him, and her touch is like a snake bite because of the dangerous venom it possesses. The Misfit cannot convert himself from what he already is — he has purposefully chosen not to believe in Jesus, views himself as a "Misfit," apart from the rest of humankind, and claims "I don’t want no hep ... I’m doing all right by myself." (Reader, 2110) To break from this would be to cease to exist as The Misfit, and would signal death. The Misfit’s instant reaction is for survival, for either he accepts the grandmother’s pleas and his understanding of the world ceases to exist, or he survives, in which case the grandmother must die. The Misfit’s action indicates that he recognizes his position as an anti-communal figure, and it is the affirmation of this very existence that provides his character with an epiphanic moment similar to that of the grandmother — fleeting, but distinct.
As the grandmother lies dead in a heap, both she and The Misfit have had a moment of clarity and understanding. That it came for the grandmother through a delusional state of being is not as important as the fact that she had an epiphany at all, and should not cast a shadow on O’Connor’s allowing the grandmother’s head to clear "for an instant." The instant is as good as an eternity, as she dies immediately after her moment of grace. O’Connor in fact leaves her in the position of a child kneeling in prayer, face upturned to heaven, "(she) sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky" (Reader, 2111), inferring an eternal grace. The point of the grandmother’s death is not its brutal violence, but the revelation the moment of recognition brought to both The Misfit and the grandmother only moments before.
Ouisa’s epiphanic moment is brought about under similar, if less violent conditions. Ouisa also loses her grasp on reality as she moves closer to her moment of grace. In the case of the grandmother the shock and horror of her situation affect her to the point where she confuses The Misfit with one of her own children. Similarly, Ouisa’s final conversation with Flan evolves from the anecdote of their attempts to locate Paul after his arrest to a free-associating personal confession that is arguably delusional and suggests that Paul is one of her own children. The problem Ouisa overcomes to experience her epiphany is ironically expressed by Flan near the play’s close, "...the problems painters are still dealing with. Color. Structure. Those are the problems." (118) Ouisa works to remove the color from herself to reach the purity symbolized by the pink shirt:
Flan: Cezanne would leave blank spaces in his canvasses if he couldn’t account for the brush stroke, give a reason for the color.
Ouisa: Then I am a collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes. I am all random.
For Ouisa, to be "all random" is the opposite of possessing structure, and the realization of her plight begins when she states that she is a "collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes." To be pure, then, is to remove these unaccounted-for brush strokes, thereby leaving only the opacity of the thing itself, in this case the "thing" being the self. It is Ouisa’s very randomness that allows her to peel away the dirt and grime of the past in order to see clearly. Ouisa is aligned with Cezanne because she becomes aware of the self as an artist. In so doing she becomes an artist of the self, and, similar to Cezanne, comes to detest the unaccounted-for brush strokes in herself.
Guare opens Ouisa’s imagination for her own benefit, for it is through her imagination that she sees Paul for one last time, the illuminated messenger that provides Ouisa with the last push she needs to realize the pure opacity she seeks. This freeing of the imagination begins as she ponders the Riker’s Island suicide reported in the newspaper and whether or not it could have been Paul. She wonders, if it was Paul, if he hung himself with the pink shirt, "But if it was the pink shirt. Pink. A burst of pink. The Sistine Chapel. They’ve cleaned it and it’s all these colors." (119) Her language indicates that all unaccounted-for brush strokes have been eliminated, leaving Ouisa with pure color, embodied in the pink shirt and the cleaned Sistine Chapel. For the first time Ouisa experiences the feeling of removing all labels, conventions, and expectations, leaving only a pure self. "Pink. A burst of pink." There is no room for other colors in these simple words, and despite Ouisa’s free-association there is strength in the purity of the moment. Guare’s recalling of the Sistine Chapel gives the moment a religious overtone as well. Ouisa makes a connection between herself and the Sistine Chapel, cleaned with simply Q-tips and water, and in a sense she has been cleansed and baptized into a new realm of thinking. She may still be a collage of "all these colors," but there is no longer an intrusion on the purity of the color of the self. As an artist of the self she has now created an object the only opacity of which is the opacity of the object itself.
It is at this time that Paul makes his last appearance. Angelically appearing above Ouisa wearing the pink shirt, he says, "The Kandinsky. It’s painted on two sides." (120) The stage directions read, "He glows for a moment and is gone. / She considers. She smiles. / The Kandinsky begins its slow revolve." (120) That Paul appears with this message in Ouisa’s imagination is significant not only because it gives her the final push toward a personal revelation, but also because Ouisa uses the medium (the imagination) that Paul advertised as "the passport we create to take us into the real world" (19) to reach her personal epiphany. At the conclusion she takes on the nature of a piece of art herself—she merely smiles. This is the opposite of anecdotage in that she ceases to speak, thereby eliminating the possibility of betraying the experience.
Similar to the case of the grandmother and The Misfit, it can be argued that Ouisa’s epiphany occurs outside the bounds of rational thought, and that this should be taken into consideration, somehow detracting from the significance of the epiphanic moment. At issue, however, is not whether or not the epiphanies occur under doubtful circumstances, thereby providing an arena for discounting their significance. The significance lies in the fact that the characters experience any epiphany at all, which they do, and that the two works have this in common suggests that the authors feel that an epiphany may only occur when the mind has lost its ability to reason. Perhaps it is only then, when stripped entirely of our ability to rationalize, that we can experience moments of truth and grace.