Told in third person limited, “Parker’s Back” relates the story of O.E. Parker, who, following his flight from the Navy, marries a woman he cannot stand. She, in turn, does not approve of him. However, his desire for her approbation becomes a consistently motivating element in the story.
Narrative Summary
Throughout his life, when Parker becomes restless, he fills the front of his body with tattoos, seeking to achieve the Garden-of-Eden style beauty he viewed at the age of 14 on the skin of a tattooed circus performer. By comparison, his own body art disappoints him.
Once married, Parker takes a job as handyman for a wealthy elderly woman, who looks down on him. After accidently destroying the woman's tractor and setting one of her trees on fire, he flees to the city, where he stays for several nights. While there, a tattoo artist works on a significant new tattoo, intended to please his disapproving wife, who has consistently dismissed his body art as vanity. This time the tattoo will appear on his still untouched back.
When he comes home, Sarah Ruth does not appreciate the tattoo, a Byzantine image of Jesus. Instead she beats Parker wildly with the broom, until the face on his back is distorted by welts. The story ends with Parker crying by a pecan tree outside the house.
Characters: Sarah Ruth
Sarah Ruth’s character is revealed by her appearance, actions, and a brief sketch of her background. She is described as deadly plain, never made-up, has onion-thin skin, and gray ice-pick eyes, a detail that indicates the pointed, cutting nature of her personal resolution. Her belief system is unbending. And perhaps because her father was a Straight Gospel Preacher, she shuns churches, icons, and any manifestation of the spiritual. O’Connor takes care to note her suspicious behavior and relentless search for sin in others. Sarah Ruth is pregnant with the couple’s first child, although Parker finds this no cause for celebration.
Characters: Parker
Parker, which O’Connor describes as “as regular as a loaf of bread”, is both an Everyman and an enigma. This is primarily due to the fact that, as he frequently avows, he does not understand himself and projects no firmness of character, other than his general shiftlessness.
Parker appears to have an affinity for structure and boundaries, but once inside them, he struggles against them. This is evident in his flight from his religious mother, from the Navy, and his contempt for Sarah Ruth both physically and emotionally.
Parker’s Back: A Metaphor
Covering his chest, arms, hands, and belly with tattoos, Parker has been consistently concerned with what he can see in the mirror. Therefore, his back long remained untouched. Parker usually gets another tattoo when he feels a hazy, nagging emptiness. And he performs this acquisitive action to achieve a kind of personal contentment. With his own body, he seeks to recreate the same effect he experienced upon seeing the tattooed circus man, but when Parker views the overall effect of his own tattoos, he is only disappointed.
It can be argued that Parker covers himself with tattoos because he is unfulfilled, which, to a certain degree, is why he seeks rules, disapproval and obligation (only to later run from them). Criticism and rules impose restrictions and structure, which temporarily distract Parker from his internal discontent: for him, it is better to have something to struggle against than to wrestle with internal emptiness.
A Soul Full of Cobwebs
At the end, when light pours into Parker, O'Connor indicates that his soul is full of cobwebs. O'Connor writes, "'Obidiah,' he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts." The selection of spider web imagery calls up ideas of empty, uninhabited buildings. O’Connor chooses this imagery purposefully to demonstrate his previously empty internal uncertainty momentarily transformed by enlightenment.
Parker’s bare back seems to likewise signify his empty soul, onto which he attempts to incise a concept of God. Parker uses his individual language—tattoos—to, by instinct, get closer to personal understanding and to gain both fulfillment and acceptance from his disapproving wife. The fact that he cannot see the image of God on his back is indicative of his willingness to believe in the unseen. However, this is not good enough for Sarah Ruth, who believes that God and all spiritual things do not have a physical manifestation. They simply are. To define them pictorially is sacrilege. On seeing Parker's tattoo, Sarah Ruth says, "He don't look," Sarah Ruth said. "He's a spirit. No man shall see his face."
Biblical Symbolism
"Parker’s Back" is replete with Biblical symbolism. O’Connor makes reference to the Garden of Eden appearing in the inspirational circus performer’s tattoos. The Garden of Eden imagery appears again, as light pours into Parker’s empty soul.
With the new tattoo of the stern, Byzantine-style face of Jesus on his back, he is forced by Sarah Ruth to say his full name aloud: Obidiah Elihue, a name he reviles. Obidiah translates to “Servant of God”; Elihue translates to “My God is He.” With this admission, he becomes enlightened and gains entrance to the house, where his judgemental wife's opinion presides.
The burning tree is likewise a powerful analogue of the Burning Bush. In the process of destroying the tractor, Parker loses a shoe, much like Moses, who must remove his shoes before he can be in the presence of the Burning Bush.
Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, incorporated religious elements in her stories frequently. Her work seems possessed of its own indecisiveness on the subject. And, frequently, as with “Parker’s Back”, she offers little interpretative evidence of her true intentions, allowing the reader to project or infer meaning based on narrative and characterization alone.
With “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor offers a complex portrait of the search for completion and contentment, divergent conceptions of spiritual understanding, and a perfect depiction of painful self-awareness.
Savannah Schroll Guz - Savannah Schroll Guz holds a Master's Degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1997-1998, she was a Fulbright Scholar and worked as a ...
