Imagery in A View Of The Woods

“The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant and hostile. “You been whipped,” it said, “by me” and then it added, bearing down on each word, “and I’m PURE Pitts.” (545)

Filling this story with vivid imagery, O’Connor allows us to envision each event in our mind as if we were a part of it.  From the very beginning, we are told of Mr. Fortune’s “battered mulberry-colored Cadillac, the red corrugated lake, and the black line of woods which appeared at both ends of the view to walk across the water and continue along the edge of the fields.” (525). But perhaps the most important sight in this story is how Mr. Fortune views his granddaughter, Mary Fortune. Despite the seventy years that separates them in age, Mr. Fortune is convinced that Mary is his splitting image both inside and out and most importantly to him, he believes they are similar in the way they think. “He had seen that even at the age of one day she bore his unmistakable likeness.” (527).

As Mary begins to turn against her grandfather, we can also see that the imagery in the story begins to turn darker. Mr. Fortune began to have hallucinations of someone being wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathing in blood.  He awoke to an empty room, one that was unfamiliar to him because Mary had always been there to great him in the morning, perhaps symbolizing that as his granddaughter started to drift away from his life, he himself became empty and had nothing else to live for. Before the brawl between the two, we are brought into a scene that is threatened with a storm brewing, helping set the mood for something gloomy to follow.

I felt that the quote I provided was the most important image in O’Connor’s work. I feel that he was looking into a mirror image, needing to beat out the Pitts that had entered his body and go back to seeing the world the "Fortune way". He had allowed his own greed to somehow get the best of him.  By using the word "it" when he sees Mary over him, we can tell that he is no longer looking into the eyes of the granddaughter that he has loved since day one, but instead I believe that he sees a problem within himself that he must fix, sacrificing his granddaughter for his own greed and pride.


Discussion Question: How does Mr. Fortune resemble Mr. Pitts throughout the story? Is imagery truly effective in helping reflect the twists and turns as they happen?