Oldal 288 [288]
KATALIN G. KÁLLAY
to which the initiation is indeed to be taken seriously. As the author claims,
most of her stories contain a “moment of grace.” The challenging question is
if and where this moment is to be found in this particular text.
It is significant that in the morning, when she takes the child from home,
Mrs. Connin does not know his first name, and Harry, after hearing about
the faith healer, says his name is also Bevel, which the babysitter takes
literally, thinking of it as a special coincidence. Thus, in terms of naming,
the child might unconsciously or jokingly baptize himself, at least in the sense
of repeating and taking up the name of the preacher before being immersed
in the river.
Like in many of O’Connor’s works, names are symbolic here: the Ashfields,
Harry’s quite negligent parents, live a life of partying. Their apartment is full
of dirty ashtrays, and they do not seem to care much about where exactly their
sleepy son is going at 6 AM on Sunday with the drowsy babysitter (who is
taking the boy after a night-shift of cleaning somewhere else). In the chilly
autumn morning, it is only the preacher’s last name, Summers, that might
remind the boy (and the reader) of warmth. Later in the story, at the healing
event, the sceptical criticism of the preacher’s words comes from a man with
a scary and distorted face called Mr. Paradise. At the end of the story, it is
Mr. Paradise who tries to save the child from drowning by running after
him with a one-foot-long candy stick, but in vain. Through the homophone,
Mr. Paradise’s name seems to parodize, i.e. make a parody of, any Christian
message, thus turning the moment of grace into its travesty. I will return later
in this essay to the possible interpretations of the name Bevel.
Ralph C. Wood, in his careful and thorough analysis of the story,’ says
the following:
In “The River” as with all of her stories, O'Connor presses her readers to drastic
conclusions. In this regard, they share the hard-edged quality of Jesus’ parables
and sayings. For example, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Mark10:25);
or “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor” (Luke 18:22).
So must we decide whether Preacher Summers and Mrs. Connin have done Harry
a terrible and final violence, or whether they have given him the most important
of all gifts—eternal life. There is no humanistic way of avoiding such a drastic
either-or. The story’s dire outcome cannot be justified by insisting that the child
unfortunately literalized the preacher’s message and thus mistakenly ended his
own life. The story would thus become a trite exercise in the sentimentality that
> Ralph C.Wood, The Scandalous Baptism of Harry Ashfield in Flannery O’Connor’s
“The River,” in: Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor Sacrament, Sacramental and the
Sacred in Her Fiction. Ed. Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede. Macon, GA:
Mercer University Press 2007.
+ 286 ¢
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