The Geranium and Judgment Day: I need you to need me

Something that I thought was very interesting was how the two men in these stories, Tanner and Old Dudley, both felt the need to be needed. One of the bigger examples of this is when Old Dudley in The Geranium remembered when he would go fishing, "He liked to come in at night with a long string of them and slap them down in the sink. 'Few fish I got,' he'd say. It took a man to get those fish, the old girls at the boarding house always said" (703). Now that he is living with his daughter in New York, all he is needed for is to get patterns from the woman downstairs and looking at the geranium. He needs a lot of help as well when he is trying to get around New York, and when he falls on the stairs. In Judgment Day, the story opens up with Tanner having been dressed by his daughter. I find it interesting that O'Connor wrote a story from the perspective of a couple men who still want to be needed, after we have read so many stories with "absent men" or men who are unsympathetic characters.

I think these two stories are also interesting to consider with what was talked about in class on Wednesday about the absent men in the stories we have been reading. Although the two men these stories were physically present in these stories and the stories were told from their perspectives, I feel that since they were not needed, they could fall under the category of "absent men."