30 pages • 1 hour read
Flannery O'ConnorA Late Encounter with the Enemy
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Diction
Diction is the effective use of specific words in literature. In “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” O’Connor uses diction as a form of characterization, using different linguistic registers for exposition and dialogue, and even shifting the diction as the narrator moves from Sally’s consciousness to that of her grandfather.
Phrases such as “didn’t give two slaps” (153), and “the damn procession” (154), and “no more a notion of dying than a cat” (160) indicate the General’s perspective and contribute to his characterization as aggressive, crude, and old-fashioned. When the point of view shifts to Sally, the diction changes. In her imagination, she repeats the exhortation, “See him!” in a tone of almost Biblical authority, while deriding the “upstarts” of her college. However, she also reflects on “how sweet it would be to see the old man in his courageous gray” (156). Sally’s language—and the language used to describe her thoughts—oscillates between aggressive and restrained, but it remains at all times self-consciously formal, in contrast with that of her grandfather. This technique is also used with more minor characters—the reader is asked to imagine the 10-year-old John Wesley condescendingly saying he’ll “take care of everything” and the host of the film premiere insincerely stating “he was really happy to have [the General] here tonight” (158).
This use of diction offers an entry into the hearts and minds of the story’s characters. This depth emphasizes the ugliness of human nature. Further, the change in language in the story creates a sense of uncertainty for the reader, contributing to the broader uncertainty and sense of mystery the story seeks to convey.
Repetition
Many features of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” are repeated to create meaning. When a symbol or motif is repeated at a later point in the story, it takes on new and heightened significance.
The General frequently confesses that he has forgotten key events in his life. This forgetfulness is not merely a quirk of his character but an active erasure of the past—one that illustrates the theme of Modernity and the Fetishization of the Past. The General allows himself to be transformed into a symbol of an idealized past whose actual content has been collectively forgotten. His own lack of memory symbolizes the emptiness of the idealized history he stands for.
Sally repeats Mr. Govisky’s naming of the General as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash, demonstrating her own embrace of this artificial history. When the general sits at the Capitol City Museum in his uniform, his “fixed” look makes clear that he has been almost fully transformed from a living man into an inanimate artifact. Later, Sally sees him gazing ahead with the same fixed gaze at her graduation ceremony. She holds her head high, proud of the dignity and courage that gaze represents in her mind, not realizing that he is in fact already dead. Lastly, John Wesley’s two Coca-Colas bookend this final scene. The first leads him to neglect the General, leaving him temporarily hatless and exposed to the harsh sun; on the second occasion, the modern, mass-produced pleasure signals that the general and the ersatz tradition he stood for are dead.
Epiphany
Epiphany is a moment of sudden clarity in which a character gains or is granted a more complete understanding of themselves, their world, or the people around them. The General’s experience in the closing pages of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” can be characterized as an epiphany, though it’s one that’s unlikely to do him much good in this life, as he dies immediately afterward.
As is typical of O’Connor stories, the General does nothing to earn this epiphany. In fact, he fights it right to the end, trying to shut out the commencement speaker’s words, which remind him of a past he’d rather forget. The words enter his mind anyway through an imaginary hole in his head—a sign that his defenses against reality are failing him. He realizes that he cannot ignore history, nor should he reject the past. In his final moments, he is straining to see over the procession, to “find out what comes after the past”: that is, to see the future that cannot occur—in the commencement speaker’s formulation—unless we face the past.
Grotesque
O’Connor’s use of the grotesque is one of the most often-discussed stylistic features of her work. Through his device, O’Connor investigates Vanity as an Obstacle to Grace and The Ultimate Inescapability of Reality.
In “A Late Encounter With the Enemy,” examples of the grotesque are particularly associated with the General. He appears naked in Sally’s dream, horrifying her, in an image which is the direct inverse of his faux-dignified appearance in uniform. His advanced age is also depicted as terrifying: Though he never considers the imminence of his death, he is at times depicted as already more dead than alive. At the museum, there is little to differentiate him from a corpse, and his corpse is wheeled around after he has died. During the graduation, he is unable to move, with the story creating a terrifying sense of suffocation and immobility.
O’Connor’s use of the grotesque emphasizes the General’s flawed character. Further, in creating a broader grotesque atmosphere to the story, O’Connor heightens the story’s emotional intensity and shifts it away from a sense of cold, logical rationality. These jarring images shock the reader into a confrontation with the deceptions and repressed traumas that characterize O’Connor’s image of the South in the post-war era.
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