GREENLEAF In her story, “Greenleaf”, the author Flannery O’Conner shows us that people can sometimes blind their factual vision of the world through a mask of dreams, so that they would not be able to make a distinction between reality and their dreams of reality. O’Conner unveils this through the use of point of view , character, irony, and symbol.Being told through the limited omniscient point of view, this story takes place on a dairy farm, which was the only thing left to Mrs. May when her husband died. Mrs. May is a strong willed mother of two, who has many dreams and goals. She is “barely making ends meet”, as quoted from the story, through her dairy farm selling her milk. She lives at the farm, since that is the only thing she has, with her two sons Wesley, the younger child, and Scofield. Though Mrs. May was struggling, her two boys never helped or even supported her. They just lived with her and complained aboutit. Both of the boys have a career of their own. Wesley is described as a thin, bald, intellectual who did not like anything. He drove twenty miles everyday to a second-rate university where he taught, which he did not like. Now his brother Scofield is the total opposite of Wesley, it is said that the only thing they did have in common was neither cared about what happened to the farm. Scofield was a business man, he sold insurance, not just any insurance but he sold insurance that only Negroes bought. He was known as the “policy man” by the black community. His mother was very disgruntled by this fact, knowing this he would loudly shout to company that he was the “best negroe-insurance salesman in the country”. Neither of the boys were married, but Scofield would tease Mrs. May by saying that when she died he would get married to a nice fat girl like Mrs. Greenleaf that would take over the farm. So upon hearing this, Mrs. May cha...
