A Late Encounter with the Enemy

In the short story A Late Encounter with the Enemy ' by Flannery O 'Connor , General Sash is finally coming face to face with the only enemy left to him , the hard reality of time and his own mortality . A remnant of a time past , dying seems a reality he should have accepted long ago and should have , in itself , lost the power to intimidate However , choosing to live in an image of the past , that glosses over some and rewrites other details of the past , death is a hard realism that cannot be

escaped . Additionally and more so than death , the true enemy for the General is the larger concept of time itself that includes not only his eventual death , sitting on the stage at Sally 's graduation but more importantly his own life and memories that come flooding back in his final moments . For years the General has lived with Sally blissfully forgetting some of the major details of his long life and remembering what he may . In particular , his remembrance of the movie premier takes a center stage because its novelty lets him forget the realities of the war because it recalls the passage of time without the specifics of the losses and beauties of life . Sitting on the stage at Sally 's graduation , the General is confronted with the not so pleasant aspects of life . Life has not been movie premiers but rather the long struggle of living through more than a century of upheaval and change...