The Genesis and Development of "Parker's Back"

• Main Author: Brewer, Kara Pratt
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarly Commons 1976
• Subjects: Literature; Language; literature and linguistics; Arts and Humanities; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/3201; https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4168&context=uop_etds

”Parker’s Back” is the last short story Flannery O'Connor wrote before the ravaging disease Lupus took her life in August of 1964. When Caroline Gordon visited her “in a hospital a few weeks before her death,” she spoke of her concern about finishing it. “She told me that the doctor had forbidden her to do any work. He said that it was all right to write a little friction, though, she added with a grin and drew a notebook from under her pillow. She kept it there she told me and was trying to finish a story which she hoped to include in the volume which we both knew would be published posthumously.” The story was “Parker’s Back,” and it was, indeed, published after her death: initially in Esquire magazine (April, 1965) and later that same year in Everything that Rises Must Converge. Genetic criticism, then, can serve as an invaluable critical tool, and it reveals something of the author herself and her intentions; furthermore, it illumines the imaginative development of the story, the ways in which alterations in the form and content led to meaning. Disciplined effort and the creative process itself transformed the crudity of the early drafts of “Parker’s Back” to the art of the final version. For the critic who has been intrigued at the seeming “ease” with which she communicates the vagaries of man’s relationships with ultimate goodness and evil, fascination lies in following the path along which her imagination led her. Like the hound dog to which she likened herself once, we too can “follow the scent.” And if as she said, “It’s the wrong scent and you stop and go back,” in the manuscripts one can pursue the story’s trail on its winding way to its final telling.