Terry White introduces her article, "Allegorical Evil, Existentialist Choice in O'Connor, Oates, and Styron" giving the reader the impression that she intends to explain how Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and the camp-doctor passage of William Styron's Sophie's Choice are all tied together with the common theme that "absolute evil and horrific suffering" of their respective characters "illustrate a common allegorical technique and existentialist themes." (White) This thesis sounds plausible; and while still reading the remainder of the introductory paragraph, a reader might even think that it will be supported with actual, concrete evidence from the works mentioned. Terry White fails miserably in her apparent attempt to support her thesis and introduction. Terry White's "Allegorical Evil, Existentialist Choice in O'Connor, Oates and Styron" does nothing more than try to explain that the climactic choices of characters in three different works were made with religious motivation, rather than existentialist choice as the title indicates but ends up contradicting this attempt by showing how each character simply just wanted to reduce the number of fatalities.
             White intends to explain that the main characters in O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find", Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", and the camp-doctor passage of William Styron's Sophie's Choice make turning-point decisions with the under pressure of absolute evil, and even what White claims to be the presence of Satan himself. White even goes so far as to point out that as the grandmother in O'Connor's story is about to die, she "pled for her life with the name of Jesus on her lips" in an attempt to support her idea that religious motivations, particularly of the Christian religion, are the motivations that each character uses to make the life-altering, even life-ending decisions...