A Late Encounter with the Enemy

Both Sally and her grandfather spend the bulk of their lives hiding from reality, seeking escape in fantasy. Sally avoids feeling shame at her professional and academic struggles by convincing herself that she is the inheritor of a noble Southern tradition embodied in the figure of her war-hero grandfather—a heritage that marks her as inherently superior to the “upstarts” at the college. The General, for his part, happily takes on the identity of “General Tennessee Flintrock Sash”—an utter fiction created by Hollywood film producers—basking in the empty adulation showered on this fictional man as a way to avoid facing his actual, traumatic memories.

At no point in the story does the General seek insight or wisdom. In fact, he actively avoids them, steering his mind away from any contemplation of the past and insisting that “what happened then wasn’t anything to a man living now and he was living now” (163). Though he is 104 years old, he does not consider the inevitability of death, nor does he feel any desire to understand his life before leaving it. He loves parades because he associates them with life and with the present, and he hates and fears processions, which he associates with death and the past. The Hollywood film premiere—the only memory the General cares to think about—is the ultimate parade: a celebration of history that strips that history of context or meaning, transforming it into an empty spectacle divorced from both past and future. On that stage, George Poker Sash is reborn as the General, a hero whose status rests not on any actual deeds but solely on his crisp uniform and gleaming sword.

In the general’s mind, Sally’s graduation ceremony is the opposite of the film premiere. He dreads it even before it happens, thinking, “a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx” (154). This hyperbolic joke becomes literal in the story’s closing pages: The General sees the line of black-robed graduates as a procession of angels bearing him to his death. He believes there is a hole in his head, letting in everything he tries to keep out. Though his grip on material reality is fading at this point, in another sense he is seeing more clearly than he ever has before. He sees the battlefields of the war with all their horror, and he sees the faces of his mother, his wife, and his son. He tries to ignore the words of the commencement speaker—which are forcing him into this confrontation with reality—but they enter through the hole in his head. The music enters and shines a light on the words, helping them to take root and grow. In these final moments, the General sees the reality of his life for perhaps the first time, but this vision is not a hard-won insight. It’s one that has been “dogging all his days,” and that he has done all he could to avoid (166). In O’Connor’s fiction, reality is something one can escape only for so long.