A Late Encounter with the Enemy
short story by Flannery O'Connor
"A Late Encounter with the Enemy" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in the September 1953 issue of Harper's Bazaar and republished in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). It is O'Connor's only story dealing with the American Civil War, and discusses the postbellum South's efforts to reclaim and whitewash its Confederate heritage in the 20th century. Its ending also reflects O'Connor's Roman Catholicism.
Plot summary
General George Poker Sash is a 104-year-old veteran of the American Civil War. Afflicted by dementia, he remembers very little about the War or his family—at one point, he thinks to himself that the name "Lee" (that is, Robert E. Lee) must refer to a battle instead of a man. Even so, he is frequently invited to public celebrations of the Confederacy, which Southern dignitaries have repurposed into a socially acceptable symbol of white power. He has grown to like his role as a living memorial to the Confederacy, although he is mainly concerned with attracting the attention of beautiful women in the crowd.
The General's 62-year-old granddaughter, Sally Poker, is about to graduate from college after decades of summer school. She prays every night that the General lives long enough to sit on stage during her graduation ceremony as a testament to the superiority of her family lineage.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.