The Life You Save May Be Your Own 4.

As Shiftlet is taken aback from the hitchhikers comment about his mother, in a moment of bewilderment and trepidation the invalid calls out to God, praying for Him to break forth and wash the slime from this earth! What Shiftlet is asking is for God to rid earth of those Shiftlet considers slime like the hitchhiker would insulted his mother. Ironically, immediately after these words are spoken, fantastic raindrops precipitate upon the 1920s Ford, suggesting that it is actually Shiftlet who is slime for he abandoned his wife, Lucynell, and took her familys car and seventy dollars and fifty cents no doubt a decent sum of money at the time. The gravity of the former transgression is intensified by the fact that Lucynell is deaf and has a lexicon of a couple words. This event suggests, quite optimistically, that hypocrites are subject to the judgment of a greater force, like God. 5. Mrs. Crater, a toothless widow, is withering away in her bleak plantation where she is accompanied solely by her deaf and nearly mute daughter whom her mother undoubtedly loves and the sun. Not long after the arrival of Mr. Shiftlet, Mrs. Crater is resolute in arranging a union between the enigmatic, but seemingly docile, drifting man and her daughter. Upon cursory judgment, it is easy to castigate Mrs. Crater as immoral for marrying away her helpless daughter to an individual who is poor, disabled, and friendless; however, if Mrs. Crater were to die, then her daughter would be in a predicament without her guardian. In this respect, it seems as though Mrs. Crater had made a mutually beneficial arrangement for her daughter and for herself: Mrs. Crater thought she had ensured her daughter a caretaker while simultaneously ridding herself of the burden of having to care for her disabled daughter. From the events that transpired in the story though, it is clear that Mrs. Crater was too hasty in her quest for a son-in-law, for if she had thoroughly familiarized herself with Mr. Shiftlets character then events would have transpired differently.