The story is filled with Christ imagery. In what ways does Mr. Shiftlet live up to the Christian symbols that surround him early in the story? In what ways does he actually contradict this imagery?

This story may well be one of O'Connor's most humorous stories. Even though the story as it now stands appears to focus on the attempts of two equally unscrupulous characters to gain an advantage over the other, O'Connor, through the use of color imagery and somewhat obvious symbolism, manages to make the story more than merely a humorous tale. Yet it is the humor, ultimately, which first catches the attention of most readers.

Some of O'Connor's humor is similar, at least in part, to the tradition of such Old Southwest humorists (1835-1860) as Johnson J. Hooper and George W. Harris. Hooper's Simon Suggs and Harris' Sut Lovingood are both similar to O'Connor's Shiftlet. This is especially true in Shiftlet's "swapping session" scenes with Mrs. Crater. These swapping session scenes are also reminiscent of the Armsted-Snopes exchanges in the fiction of William Faulkner. Each of the major characters in O'Connor's story is aware that he, or she, has something that someone else craves, which slowly increases the apparent value of the offer until the final bargain is struck.

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