Flannery O’Connor for Atheists

"Parker's Back” ends with O E Parker leaning against a pecan tree in his yard, "crying like a baby." Just minutes before, when he’d whispered his full name through a door barred against him by his wife—“Obadiah Elihue,” the name he'd always hidden and run from—then

all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.

But after his wife, Sarah Ruth, let him in, and Parker showed her the new stern-eyed Jesus tattoo covering his back, she’d said "It ain't anybody I know,” and she’d screamed “Idolatry!," and she’d beat him with a broom, until "welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ.” Clearly, the story is saying, Sarah Ruth is no true Christian. But what of Parker himself? What are we to make of him?

"Parker's Back” was one of Flannery O’Connor’s last stories; she died at 39 from lupus. The suffering her illness caused, and the isolation that suffering necessitated, surely matter for reading her work, and matter especially in conjunction with her faith. O'Connor was a Catholic writer, and sometimes willing to explain the role of religion in her stories:

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.

Parker, certainly, is not very willing. Early on he has no use for religion, and he marries the pious Sarah Ruth, it is implied, only to get into her pants. Then, while baling hay, he crashes his tractor into a tree, which bursts into flame. He’s thrown to the ground, and

He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

Parker runs to his truck and drives to the city. When he was fourteen he’d seen a tattooed man at a fair, and it had stirred something in him. Since then he’d covered his body with tattoos—except his back. But after the burning tree,

He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

This change demanded a new tattoo, and this time on his back: a giant image of Jesus.

O’Connor was well-aware that her reading public was not just un-Catholic (in the main), it was un-religious. So too was the world she wrote about:

My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.

It’s too facile, therefore, to say that Parker, in tattooing Jesus on his back, had found God. He is as confused by its significance as we are. Drunk at a bar, he responds to accusations that he is now a believer with denials, and his fists. It’s after this brawl that he goes home to show Sarah Ruth the tattoo—not as proof of a new faith, but because "it seemed to him that, all along, that was what he wanted, to please her.”

Obadiah was a minor prophet in the Hebrew Bible, whose name means "servant or slave to God." Parker went by “Parker,” his last name, and refused to say what “O E” stood for, until he told Sarah Ruth, swearing her to secrecy. When he arrives home, she, from behind the barred door, denies knowing him, until he says his full name. Parker of course does not know the source of his name. His name, and its revelation, are the kind of moment high school English classes pounce on: the teacher points out the symbolism, and the students take dutiful notes and think themselves enlightened. But what in fact does it mean? A simple reading is that Parker has been called to be a prophet, and, after resisting his whole life, has finally accepted the call. But this cannot be right. Parker neither says nor does anything prophetic after saying his name, and despite the “arabesque of colors” his soul briefly becomes, he seems no more enlightened than before. The connection to the Biblical Obadiah is not a parallel, but a contrast.

What do I know, but I don’t think “Parker’s Back” is a story about redemption. We’re told that,

Throughout his life, grumbling and sometimes cursing, often afraid, once in rapture, Parker had obeyed whatever instinct of this kind had come to him—in rapture when his spirit had lifted at the sight of the tattooed man at the fair, afraid when he had joined the navy, grumbling when he had married Sarah Ruth.

One can read the story against the grain, as tragic Naturalism: a man is driven by one instinct or illusion after another, and never finds happiness, because Nature or Reality is indifferent to our happiness, and because we are incapable of escaping instinct and illusion and acting freely, from ourselves. On this reading, God or religion is just the final such illusion to which Parker is subject. O’Connor writes in one essay about a “type of modern man” who

can neither believe or contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.

That could be Parker on the Naturalist interpretation, if one reads “lost God,” not as “God he can no longer see or find,” but as “God who never existed, but in whom belief is no longer possible.”

But O’Connor was a Catholic writer. The story should be read, if it can, from a place of faith. I’m not well-placed to do that, but here’s a try: the story is indeed tragic, but not for the Naturalistic reason. Parker’s impulses toward God are true, and his brief acceptances of them, authentic moments of grace. But the people and the larger world around him provide no scaffold to sustain and guide those impulses and acts. Without a scaffold those impulses and acts cannot create in Parker the final state at which they aim. In better circumstances the spiritual surgery he undergoes might have made him whole, and a light to others; instead it was a botched job, and he’s left alone to suffer its aftermath.

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See also: Against God; Free Indirect Style in the Red Badge of Courage.