Hi Larry, thanks for the video! I recently purchased O'Connor's Complete Stories and am starting at the beginning with "The Geranium". What popped out at me was the dualities throughout the story. Such as poor old Dudley and the geranium; both belong somewhere in a country setting and yet are forced to live in an unfamiliar city environment. Both experience a bad fall and end up in a precarious way. Even the two black men in the story are similar and yet different! "The Barber" is next in line which you mentioned you also made a video on so I'll check that one out next!
Two works that will offer a sociological perspective to Old Dudley’s dilemma of living as a stranger in a strange land is Alfred Schuetz’s essay “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology” (available online) and Pierre Bourdieu’s THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD: SOCIAL SUFFERING IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY. Schuetz’s essay highlights how one (we) “live by recipes” (folkways, mores, laws, habits, and customs), and then we move to a place where the recipes just don’t turn out like they’re suppose to. Bourdieu’s massive tome (almost 700 pages) are interviews with Algerians living in Paris to try to cobble together a living. “Short stories” at their finest.
