Read the excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Mr. Shiftlet was so shocked that for about a hundred feet he drove along slowly with the door stiff open. A cloud, the exact color of the boy’s hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. He raised his arm and let it fall again to his breast. "Oh Lord!" he prayed. "Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!" Which best describes the irony of the excerpt?

In a 10-12 sentence response-style paragraph, explore the degree to which you agree or disagree with faulkner’s message. “i believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. he is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. the poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. it is his privilege to man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. the poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to him endure and prevail” (faulkner 773-775).