CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

A man was looking at him. A man was in the window across the alley looking straight at him. The man was watching him cry. That was where the geranium was supposed to be and it was a man in his undershirt, watching him cry, waiting to watch his throat pop. Old Dudley looked back at the man. It was supposed to be the geranium. The geranium belonged there, not the man. 

"The Geranium," Flannery O'Connor

The first word critics use to describe Flannery O'Connor is almost always "grotesque." The American authoress depicted ordinary people in revoltingly sharp detail to cast hard shadows about the ambiguous figures of morality and human nature. No less in her short story "The Geranium," which offers a veiled critique of renting and city life.

O'Connor depicts an old man who has moved into his daughter's apartment in New York City. Simultaneously fascinated with and disgusted by the urban hub, Old Dudley finds himself reaching for any piece of the natural world: daydreaming of fishing and monitoring a geranium in the window of the apartment across the street. When he grows curious about the neighbor moving in across the hall, his daughter tells him to "tend to your own business." The code of manners in a cramped apartment is strict and it says, contra curiosity and human nature, whatever happens outside your door is none of your business.

This is the jarring in the ordinary; this is the grotesque. O'Connor recognizes there is something subhuman in what T.S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," called the "lonely men in shirtsleeves leaning out of windows." Human beings do not belong in racked-and-stacked apartment boxes, not merely because they are unpleasant, but because they create a culture of atomization that is counter to man's inherently political nature. What the reader is supposed to see is what Old Dudley only sort of recognizes, that living in "this damn hole" is eating away at the good qualities in human nature and leaving only the bad ones. At one point in the story, he encounters a woman on the stairs. Despite his waiting and watching for her to greet him, she passes by without a word.

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