The Final Lines of Good Country People

And all of these clues ar affiliated to the irony of the judgments the women make and the typifyion that ensues when Mr. Pointer pays a call.

The main way the ironic buildup occurs in "Good Country wad" is through the presentation of the thoughts and actions of Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman, and Hulga (Joy), in particular focusing on how each woman sees the world and herself in that world. To do that, the antecedent uses the omniscient point of view, revealing the thoughts of each woman in turn. That is itself ironic, for the author make loves ever soything that is happening in the story but does non reveal it to the reader. Everything is in suspense until the last moment.

Mrs. Hopewell's main characteristic appears to be her just-plain-folks attitude. She takes refuge in her "favorite sayings": Nothing is meliorate; that is life; and well, other people afford opinions (O'Connor 273-4). There is as well her faith in "good country people" as the "salt of the earth"; she is very familiar with clich?s. Even so, her misgiving over Joy's happiness is real, as is her concern that Joy is consumed with attaint at being disabled and that Joy "looked at strait-laced young men as if she could smell their stupidity" (O'Connor 276). She in any case sees Joy's outrage and sloppiness around the house as test copy that Joy is "brilliant" but does not "have a grain of sense" (276).

For her part, Joy feels trappe

d by circumstances and feels that she is worthy of a break in kind of life. She simply cannot stand her start out, sees her as completely superficial, and because of her education, intellectualism, and high-pressure atheism, feels completely entitled to respond to Mrs. Hopewell's trite expressions: "Do you ever look inside . . . and see what you are not? deity!" (276).

That rage makes Joy build for herself what belongs to her and her al wholeness: the name Hulga, which she picks in order to upset her mother; her superiority over her mother and the world because of her education and atheism; and her artificial leg, which no one but her touches and about which she is as sensitive as "a peacock about his tail" (288).

The only character whose thoughts are not revealed by the author is Manley Pointer, yet his behavior transforms the amusing irony of the story into cruel, life-changing irony. What Joy, Mrs. Freeman, and Mrs. Hopewell share without knowing it is an judgement that they have figured out exactly how the world works; they know what they know. Manley seems to prove them right, but he ultimately that is not the case. Overstaying his pleasant at supper and overplaying his Chrustian persona marks him, for Mrs. Hopewell, as a simple, dull, tire country boy--"salt of the earth." Joy's agreeing to the picnic seems based on her idea that his innocence is real rather than clich?-driven, like her mother's. When it turns out that the country-boy act is a con and indeed that he carries around a bag of condoms (get it?), the private joke is his on her.

Mrs. Freeman, as know-all and busybody who is always trying to find out
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