A Late Encounter with the Enemy

“A Late Encounter With the Enemy” explores its central theme of Modernity and the Fetishization of the Past through various techniques. The story structure, language, and settings are fragmented, thus resisting narrative progression within the story itself. However, this lack of narrative progression mirrors the lack of moral progress made by the story’s central characters. Both Sally and her grandfather actively prefer fantasy to reality, and their delusions prevent them from seeing either themselves or one another clearly. Sally views her grandfather as a symbol of her own nobility. Her most urgent desire is that he should stay alive long enough to sit on the stage at her graduation, in his military uniform, so that all her peers and mentors can witness her connection to the glorious Southern past. She imagines holding her head high as if to say, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts!” (154). The repeated exhortation, “See him!” suggests a motif in this story as, again and again, appearance takes the place of reality. The story presents Vanity as an Obstacle to Grace, as Sally remains unable or unwilling to see her grandfather as anything other than a reflection of her own importance. Sally’s grandfather, for his part, is more than willing to be exploited in this way, just as he allows the promoters of a Hollywood film about the war to use him as their poster boy, adopting the artificial identity they create for him as his own.

The fragmented structure of “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” resists the development of a logical narrative. A common plot arc begins with exposition and includes recognizable elements such as an inciting incident, rising action, and a climax. In contrast, “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” takes the form of a series of vignettes with little causal relationship between them. While the story begins with exposition—the reader is told of the General and Sally’s ages, motivations, and a little of their character—it then shifts to a movie premiere that took place 12 years before. Rather than being ordered chronologically to reflect the passage of time, the story’s events reflect the General’s own subjective recollections. The next significant event is Sally’s graduation, with the story shifting back to its present day.

Sally’s graduation is the story’s climax—the moment when the characters and their principles are tested most severely and the thematic concerns of the text are most evident. In this case, Sally’s grandfather is forced to confront The Ultimate Inescapability of Reality. The general has been dreading this inevitable confrontation from the beginning. He looks forward to sitting on the stage in his finery, being admired, but he expects the ceremony itself to be almost unbearably boring. He thinks of it as a procession—with all the funereal undertones that word implies. The General loves a parade—a spectacle that lives entirely in the present, like himself—and hates a procession, which he associates with history and thus with death. In the very first paragraph of the story, he thinks, “a procession of schoolteachers [is] about as deadly as the River Styx” (154). The reference to the mythical river dividing the realms of the living and the dead reads as a hyperbolic joke in the moment, but in the story’s closing pages it becomes unexpectedly literal as the dying General, losing his grasp on material reality, sees the black-robed graduates as a procession of angels coming to bear him away from the world of the living. In doing so, they force him to confront a deeper reality, remembering his lost loved ones and the terrible experiences of the war as he has avoided doing over the years.

The climax of a narrative often occurs before the denouement, in which the narrative’s ultimate message is communicated. In a denouement, characters’ motivations and their futures are often detailed alongside some indication of how the world might look following the narrative’s events. However, “A Late Encounter With the Enemy” includes no denouement, thus resisting the meaning and certainty a denouement offers in favor of uncertainty and ambiguity. Sally has not even learned of her grandfather’s death as the story ends. It is unclear how she will react to the loss, how she will live without her grandfather as a living symbol of her life’s meaning, or how John Wesley, drinking a Coca-Cola—a symbol of modernity and consumerism—while standing beside his grandfather’s corpse, will find a way to live as an adult in an undefined future. O’Connor’s story resists stability and certainty, and the story’s structure reflects this ultimate uncertainty.

The story’s settings also create a sense of ambiguity. It is never stated where Sally and the General live, though the references to Atlanta as a metropolitan center suggest that they live in rural Georgia. The Hollywood promoters refer to the General as “General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy” (139, emphasis added) rather than of a specific state or city—an omission that symbolizes the emptiness of this caricature. Similarly, on Confederate Memorial Day, the General appears at a museum in “Capitol City” (139), a generic and unrecognizable name. Sally must also leave her home to attend summer school: their hometown cannot host an institution of learning—it is devoid of knowledge and has no principles to impart. The General and Sally, then, live in a place that has been divested of all of its meaning, uniqueness, and specificity. It has become voided of its significance. In this way, the story’s setting depicts the South as abandoned and left behind.

In contrast with the emptiness of the General and Sally’s Southern home is Atlanta, the story’s second setting. This is where the General and Sally attend the movie premiere, thus associating Atlanta with modernity and broader social popularity. Further, Atlanta plays a significant role in the history of the South—during the Civil War, it was an important military base for the Confederacy and was heavily burned during the North’s destruction of much of Georgia. Following the Civil War, Atlanta emerged as a prominent symbol of the New South—symbolic of the region’s economic recovery, industrialization, and urbanization. Thus, the values of Atlanta are juxtaposed with the General and Sally’s hometown and the characters themselves—they are isolated and uncomfortable in Atlanta, just as they would be in the contemporary world.

In 1967, 12 years after this story was first published, the Marxist theorist Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, a seminal book in which he argued that the advent of mass media was turning humans into observers and performers unable to meaningfully contribute to their communities. Rather than working collectively to improve their lives, people wish only to see and be seen. This theoretical framework is useful in reading the motif of the spectacle in O’Connor’s story: Co-opted by mass media, the General has lost—or happily shed—any connection to his real, painful past. He is incapable of seeing himself as anything other than an object to be admired. At the museum, he pointedly rejects meaningful engagement, violently rebuffing a child who reaches for his sword. He speaks to no one and instead sits rigidly, almost willing himself to become an object indistinguishable from the other artifacts on display.