In Flannery O’Connors’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” she explores the consequences of the combination of hypocrisy, gullibility in social contacts, and the role of being raised at mother’s knee. Reared a strict Roman Catholic and writing in the Bible Belt South O’Connor encountered those character flaws first hand.
             The repetitive hypocrisy displayed in these three short stories is portrayed by only the men suggesting that O’Connor has certain issues with men. Tom Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” wearing his black town suit and brown hat met these two women, Lucynell Crater Sr. and her daughter Lucynell Jr. O’Connor depicted him as “a tramp and no one to be afraid of,” but in reality he is a man who makes and breaks his claims and it the process blemishing his company’s spirit. When he claims, “I can’t get married right now,” and later the trio goes into town to marry Mr. Shiflet and Lucynell Jr. is exactly the aim O’Connor wants to get across, hypocritical men. One may accidentally utter one statement and then act on the contrary, but in this short story Mr. Shiflet makes many remarks on his beliefs and almost opposing every one. One may inherit the impression that he is quite foolish by all of his self-righteous talk when he says people lie too much and later telling the youth she was a hitchhiker. On his way to Tuscaloosa he picks up a boy who only spoke telling him, “You go to the devil!” Both the boy and Lucynell Jr. represent innocence in this story and that opens Mr. Shiflet’s numb mind forcing him to change his perspective. Similar to Mr. Shiflet, yet not as repetitive as his hypocritical ways, the Bible salesman in “Good Country People,” says “I may sell bibles but I know which end is ...