Old Dudley, the Geranium

Old Dudley sees a lot of himself in the geranium, I think. He spends a lot of the story feeling vulnerable, starting with his daughter, who "made his eyes feel like his throat" (701). He lies in fear in his new surrounding, "always afraid that when he went out in the dog runs, a door would suddenly open and one of the snipe-nosed men that hung off the window ledges . . . would growl, "What are you doing here?" (708) It's a feeling of displacement, much like his take on the geranium. He condemns the owners, saying that "[t]hey set it out and let the hot sun bake it all day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock it over. They had no business with it" (701). Old Dudley feels like he could get by back home, as "[h]e had been doing all right. There was his pension that could feed him and odd jobs that kept him his room at the boarding house" (702). Old Dudley makes a similar judgment about the geranium, noting that "Lutisha could have taken [it] and stuck it in the ground and had something worth looking at in a few weeks" (701). Reminiscing on the south, Old Dudley finds an unlikely companion in the geranium, engaging in a pathetic fallacy to draw a distinct line between where he was and where he is now. Fuming, ailing, Old Dudley can't make heads or tails of this place, where "a damn nigger that patted him on the back and called him "old timer" lives next door to his daughter, and to have done that to Old Dudley, of all people - "[h]im that knew such as that couldn't be. Him that had come from a good place . . . A place where such as that couldn't be." (711) Old Dudley feels bizarrely exposed, covering his mouth when he "realize[s] that he had made a noise" in the hall (708). He strikes a figure so much like that of the geranium at the end of the story, "at the bottom of the alley with its roots in the air" (713), upside down, his frailties exposed, uprooted and wasting away besides. Old Dudley's failed attempt to retrieve the geranium becomes representative of his plight in the city. Despite his repetition of the sentiment that he "wouldn't be trapped[, h]e wouldn't be" (711), he is overcome by fear and pride and so won't descend the stairs to retrieve the geranium. "He wouldn't go down and have niggers pattin' him on the back." (712) Instead, he returns to the room to look at the geranium, farther away than it has ever been before, six stories below. It is in this way that O'Connor makes the geranium not only a sympathetic figure to Old Dudley, but in fact a representation of the South, a place that he is too afraid to return to on his own and so only distantly recalls, wistfully reflecting on that wasted opportunity.

I have perhaps too much of a crush on "Judgment Day" to analyze it at all right now, but it seems that glasses feature prominently in both stories. Old Dudley's memory of Lutisha's glasses, reflecting on his neighbor's own, on page 708, has parallels to the actor neighbor with horn-rims (688) and Tanner winning over Coleman with a pair of glasses (683). I'm at a loss as to how they function in these stories. Any ideas?