Parker's Back

Content Warning: This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

“Parker’s Back” is a short story by Flannery O’Connor first published in Esquire magazine in 1965 and later collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge. It is the last story O’Connor wrote before her early death, and it was published posthumously. With its explicit religious themes and imagery, and rural Southern setting, “Parker’s Back” typifies the Southern Gothic subgenre.

This guide references the version of “Parker’s Back” published in Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories in 1971, which won the National Book Award for Fiction.

The story opens with Parker sitting on his front porch with his wife, musing about their marriage. Although he understands why he married her, because “he couldn’t have got her any other way” (510), he doesn’t understand why he stays with her. At this point in their relationship, he finds her unappealing due to her pregnancy and plain features. Meanwhile, his wife is concerned by his lack of religion.

The narrative then delves into the story of how they met. When his truck broke down, Parker sensed her watching from a nearby house and pretended to hurt his hand, cursing and yelling. She suddenly appears and hits him on the face, and in his confusion, he thinks of her as “some creature from above, a giant hawk-eyed angel wielding a hoary weapon” (512). When she touches his hand to inspect his injury, the narrator says that Parker feels “jolted back to life” (512). Although he initially doesn’t want anything to do with her, he experiences a sense of attraction as she examines the tattoos which cover his forearm.

This begins a second layer of backstory when Parker was 14 and saw a tattooed man at the fair. The tattooed man is only wearing a loincloth and is otherwise covered in what seems to Parker “a single intricate design of brilliant color” (512). The tattooed man fills Parker with intense emotion. Soon after, he gets his first tattoo, and the pain makes him feel like it’s a worthwhile pursuit. As he grows older, he begins to work only to purchase more tattoos, otherwise seemingly lacking ambition or goals in life.

His mother, who supports him, takes him to a religious revival one night, but as soon as he sees the church he wrenches out of her grasp and flees. The next day, he decides to join the navy. During Parker’s five years in the navy, he accumulates more tattoos in each location he travels to, and with each one he is filled with a growing sense of dissatisfaction because of their haphazard appearance. He gets tattoos only in places on his body he can see, leaving his back untouched. After going AWOL from the navy, he is imprisoned and then released with a dishonorable discharge. He picks up odd jobs to pay his rent.

The story then returns to the courtship with his wife. Initially, the woman mocks his tattoos as “vanity of vanities” (515). Still, he is intrigued without fully knowing why and returns to see her the next day, bringing her a basket of apples. When the woman asks Parker what his name is, he replies “O. E. Parker” (517) and initially refuses to tell her what the initials stand for. Finally, he reveals that it’s Obadiah Elihue. She reveals her name is “Sarah Ruth Cates” (517). With this exchange of information, their courtship commences. When he tries to initiate sex, however, she violently rejects him, and he marries her to sleep with her.

Parker’s marriage with Sarah Ruth does not satisfy him in the way he hoped. She frequently criticizes him for not considering a more meaningful life and asks how he will respond to God on judgment day for his lifestyle. Dissatisfaction grows so great in Parker that the only way he can see to deal with it is to get another tattoo, but the only blank space left is his back. He begins to fantasize about getting a tattoo there that his wife “would not be able to resist” (519) such as something religious.

A few days later he is baling hay but gets distracted by the sun bearing down on him and his fantasies of tattoo designs, and he crashes the tractor into a lone tree in the middle of a field. With the tractor overturned and the tree on fire, Parker is at first discombobulated, but then makes his way to his truck and drives to the city. He doesn’t allow himself to think on the drive because, the narrator says, he feels “there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown” (521).

Parker goes to a tattoo artist he used before. He asks to see depictions of God. Parker looks at the designs and chooses “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” (522). Parker spends the night at a Christian Mission because it’s free, and has the tattoo completed the next morning. That night and the next morning he is plagued by visions of the burning tree.

After the tattoo is finished, Parker gets a drink at a pool hall. While there, his acquaintances pull up his shirt to see his new tattoo. When they realize it’s an image of Christ, they are initially awestruck, then begin to cajole and tease Parker about having found religion. Parker denies it but winds up in a brawl. After the fight, Parker sits in an alley “examining his soul” (527). In the same way he felt compelled to get tattoos, to join the navy, and to marry his wife, he now feels compelled to obey the eyes tattooed on his back.

On the drive home, Parker senses a shift in his life and feels like a stranger among the familiar terrain and landmarks. At home, he finds the door locked. He begins beating on it and calling out Sarah Ruth’s name. She asks who’s there, and when he replies O.E., she says, “I don’t know no O.E.” (528). Finally, he says his full name to her: Obadiah Elihue. She lets him in. He immediately shows her the tattoo, but she shows no recognition of the figure at first, saying it’s nobody she knows. When Parker insists it’s an image of God, she grows angry, yelling, “Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don’t want no idolater in this house!” (529). She hits him with a broom until he exits the house. At the end of the story, she sees him in the yard, leaning against a pecan tree and crying.