Flannery O’Connor

Type :

School essay

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

10/28/2007

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction
The titles of O'Connor's stories
The all encompassing knowledge of the dispassionate and ironic
The unfortunate and erroneous characters
This unraveling of the preternatural truth and denial
Razing the self constructed hero
O'Connor's treatment of her characters
Conclusion

Abstract

flannery O'connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may find her to be unnaturally grotesque in her stark portrayal of the often heinously morally and socially contaminated characters featured in her stories. Nevertheless, her tough-minded short stories give staggering cultural and spiritual commentary when one takes heed of the profuse blend of the serious and ironic in her work. She does not in fact, stringently admonish the inherent faults of her characters but brings them to fruition in order to expose and enervate these faults with her belief in the rather morbid preternatural tool of grace. For this reason, the protagonists, or often times, jaded Christ figures in her works who seem the farthest from being deemed spiritually or socially "good" are the characters who are given redemption most frequently by those characters who are supposedly socially seamless. Although her writing is exponentially filled with her spiritual and cultural awareness, the mundane and dialectic styling of her prose allows for a very neutral and unbiased body of work. It is only when the reader regards the symbolism behind the seemingly blatant grotesqueries in her work that they begin to grasp the fundamental themes of hypocrisy, prejudice, and arrogance that are so thickly elucidated in each story.