There are many people in the world today that are could easily relate to the character Joy in O'Connor's short story Good Country People. They are able to relate to Joy because she was a person of low-self esteem which stemmed from her self pity, even though O'Connor probably meant to portray her as a person with plenty of pride. I feel that he also used his character Pointer to portray the type of person who takes advantage of people with low self-esteem with out even knowing it.
             I have this friend that I'm going to call "Jack". Jack has very low self esteem and feels like he is ugly and undesirable. His self esteem is so low that he feels that he has to spend all of his money on a girl just for her to like him. For instance say Jack met this girl named Jill. Jill picked up on Jack's self esteem problem and took advantage of it by getting him to buy her new furniture for her apartment and by getting him to pay her bills so that she doesn't have to work. Things like this happen on a daily basis in some people's lives that have low self esteem.
             Joy also had a bad self esteem problem. Her low self esteem came when her leg was accidentally shot off while on a hunting trip and was replaced by a wooden prosthetic when she was ten years old. Joy was able to hide her low self esteem and feelings of shame by getting an education and obtaining her Ph.D. in philosophy. Joy used her education to look down on other people as inferior because she was smarter than them. This was evident throughout the whole story by the way she thought about people and how she talked to them. Doing this was sort of like her saying that she was better than them. Through these means she was able to boost her self esteem. This is how bullies tend to boost their self esteem except that they usually use humiliation as a way to lower someone else's self esteem and build theirs up.
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