The Enduring Chill

In this short story each of the characters seem to embody a certain type of intellect that appears to be completely different from each other and utterly incompatible with each other. Asbury attempts to embody a type of trancendental artistic intellect, his sister dedicates herself to a cold, academic, and objective type of intellectualism and their parents represent an intellegence that adheres to the practicality and utilitarianism of the South. Through free indirect discourse O'Connor reveals the ways in which none of these characters can understand the the beliefs of the others because each believes the others to be inferior in some way. Mrs. Fox attempts to give her children an education but believes that "the more education they got, the less they could do" (551) and that "when people think they are smart... there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight" (550-1). Mary George believes that Asbury "was not an artist and that he had no talent that that was the trouble with him" (552) and that to snap him out of his delusions he needs "two or three shock treatments" to "[g]et that artist business out of his head" (563). Asbury seems to think that he must sacrifice his life to 'Art' and that anyone who does not do so is living their life frivolously. Each character is clearly in posession of the intellect necessary to reconcile their differences, but their own feelings of superiority make them distrustful of the decisions that the other makes. The entire story functions as an allegory for the ways that people fractionalize themselves based on the different values they place on different kinds of intellect and different ideas about the world.