Essay On Characterization For Main Character

In “The River,” a short story by O’Connor, the main character is Harry Ashfield, who is about four to five years old with a long face and bulging chin and half-shut eyes set apart (). Despite being raised by atheist parents, his babysitter, Mrs. Connin accompanies him to the river to be baptized by Bevel the preacher. The following morning, Harry returns to the river and drowns himself in search for God. The story is told in a third-person narrator’s perspective. The boy’s babysitter has a lifestyle that is contrary to that of his parents, who always drink and party. She is a religious woman who would also wish they boy to follow Christian teachings and not that lived by his parents.
The day after the boy is baptized and renamed Bevel by the preacher, he becomes anonymous for a long time with the narrator referring to the boy as ‘he’ and intentionally avoiding addressing him by name. In the subsequent paragraphs of the story, his name changes depending on the people his is with them. To his family, they know him as Harry, however, he introduces himself to strangers as Bevel and anonymous ‘he’ while by himself.
The boy’s curiosity is evident in the story; when he sees a portrait picture over his babysitter’s bed, he inquires about the photo, which Mrs. Connin tells him to be Jesus. The family in which the boy is brought up in is a secular family where Jesus does not have any visual identity. He refers to Jesus as the man in the sheet in the picture over the bed. He only calls him Jesus after his babysitter calls him so.