Thats Just The Way Things Are
... 7, 02 That’s Just the Way Things Are In today’s society many people just go along in life doing what the next person does, or following the popular trend. ... I think that one of the most mindless phrases in the world is when people say, “that’s just the way things are. ... When looking at the themes of Good Country People and The Lesson it is evident that O’Connor and Bambara were trying to write stories make the reader think about things, such as life in general as well as the way people behave. ... Hopewell who really was presented by O’Connor as hopeless throughout the story by the way she spoke and lived. She was very plain and stuck in her ways befitting of the way that some people and perhaps the author perceived some Southerners. ... Bambara’s characters don’t go as deep or have as much significance to a story that was more or less trying to make a statement about society and push readers to think about the way that social classes are set in America. It just doesn’t seem right that on one side of the street there are people who might have a one hundred fifty thousand dollar car, and on the other side there is a persons house that doesn’t cost that much. ... O’Connor uses irony to make her readers think about the way people behave, as she expresses what perhaps are her thoughts about Christianity, and religion as a whole given her Catholic background; just as Bambara uses similar tactics in her work to perhaps express the injustice, or at least questioning, of the way society is setup. ... One would think that with the religious tones that Flannery O’Connor incorporates in Good Country People as well as many of her other works, that she has trouble dealing with the concept and seriousness of religion with the way she has come to view it as she was brought up. However, I think it is good that she questions these things in her literature because it allows others to do the same thing by reading it.