A Late Encounter with the Enemy

Both Sally and her grandfather spend the bulk of their lives hiding from reality, seeking escape in fantasy. Sally avoids feeling shame at her professional and academic struggles by convincing herself that she is the inheritor of a noble Southern tradition embodied in the figure of her war-hero grandfather—a heritage that marks her as inherently superior to the “upstarts” at the college. The General, for his part, happily takes on the identity of “General Tennessee Flintrock Sash”—an utter fiction created by Hollywood film producers—basking in the empty adulation showered on this fictional man as a way to avoid facing his actual, traumatic memories.

At no point in the story does the General seek insight or wisdom. In fact, he actively avoids them, steering his mind away from any contemplation of the past and insisting that “what happened then wasn’t anything to a man living now and he was living now” (163). Though he is 104 years old, he does not consider the inevitability of death, nor does he feel any desire to understand his life before leaving it. He loves parades because he associates them with life and with the present, and he hates and fears processions, which he associates with death and the past.