In the story "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" by Flannery O'Connor, and " The Death of Justina" by John Cheerer, both authors use vivid memories of events that never occur and fantasies about what life should be to facilitate social changes. Throughout both stories, the writer's underlying meaning is that life and society are better perceived in the mind's eye as what each individual wishes his/her perception to be. This is necessary as reality can be enough to push the mind to create a false world that we all live in together.

" A Late Encounter with the Enemy," is a story of an aging graduate from college and her struggle to show the world that she has made it in a egotistic world that could find no place for dignity, honor and courage. Throughout the lives of "General" George Sash and his granddaughter Sally it is obvious from the beginning that neither of these two characters has a firm grip on what reality is. Sally's life changed with the changing society at the early age of sixteen. The changes Sally is having to deal with are the slow death of her grandfather and the fact that she is sixty-two and just graduating from college. Things wer

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Though very similar in context, "The Death of Justina" by John Cheever, shows a totally different way of dealing with societal changes. Here we have the story of Moses. He is your everyday guy that works for a living, but has a distorted view of what is actually going on with the changes around him. Cheever's puts Moses into a predicament that he may not get out of as his wife's old cousin Justina comes for visit and then dies on his couch. Moses recently gave up drinking and smoking and soon found out how drastically things would change around him. He was dependant on the substances to bring reality as is seen in this passage: "I won't go into the commonplace symptoms of withdrawal, but I would like to point out that, standing at my window in the evening, watching the brilliant afterlight and the spread of darkness, I felt, through the lack of these humble stimulants, the force of some primitive memory in which the coming of night with its stars and its moons was apocal!

The societal change he is facing is the lack of understanding his community has with the death of Justina. There are laws in place that would not even let her die in the zone he was living in. A doctor went so far as to tell hem, "As soon as you get to zone C, it's all right. You can just say that she died in the car"(Cheever 546). This change in the way society handles death is almost too much for Moses to take. Add this

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Approximate Word count = 1002
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)