Flannery O Connor's The Displaced Person

Essay 3
Did you know that renowned short story author Flannery O'Connor loved peacocks? Shortly before her early death at the age of 39, O'Connor owned around 40 birds (Eby 2013). This fact will not come as surprising to those who have read O'Connor's work, as the peacock is often found in her stories, many times being used as a religious symbol, such as in her short story The Displaced Person (Eby 2013). Similarly, well-loved author C.S. Lewis's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia takes a turn for the semi-autobiographical when Lewis begins his fantasy stories with children fleeing from war and taking refuge in the mansion of a scholarly old professor. During World War II, Lewis himself took in many refugees, and there is little doubt
McIntyre (O'Connor, 225-226) as well as the mystical, allegorical nature of Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where humility and self-sacrifice are presented as virtues far more noble than bravery. Both O'Connor and Lewis wrote upon the topic of the Christian faith; although their work was not always overtly Christian, themes of grace and mercy were often at the core of their writing. To be kind, humble, and full of grace—these were virtues that both O'Connor and Lewis
George Bluestone points this out in his article “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film”: “between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media […] differences in form and theme are inseparable from differences in the media (Bluestone 1-2).” This can indeed be seen in the film adaptation of The Displaced Person, where the dialogue remains much unchanged, but details such as the peacock, an important symbol which defines a lot of characters by the way they interact with it, are not conveyed in a way that translates to film. Of course, it is hard to not become frustrated with films that do not live up to the expectations of the source material, but ultimately one cannot blame the director for making a bad adaptation, but for making a bad film. My brother, a young man who is very good at science, once wrote a report on a science experiment and made a low grade. He received this grade not because he had performed poorly on the science experiment itself, but rather because he had written a low-quality summary of the experiment. There is no question that the source material was of high quality, but oftentimes adaptations do not reflect this. Not due to unfaithfulness to the original, but the inability to convey the story in the way the medium