O'Connor, Flannery - John Byars (essay date 1987)
John Byars (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: Byars, John. “Prophecy and Apocalyptic in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 16 (1987): 34-42.
[In the following essay, Byars underscores the importance of prophecy in O'Connor's work and asserts that “in a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment.”]
Critics have often noticed the crucial role prophets and false prophets play in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. She names characters Enoch and Obadiah; she transforms three adolescent vandals into “prophets dancing in the fiery furnace”; she assigns important revelatory roles to those as diverse as the enormous Mrs. Shortley, an ugly Wellesley student, a young criminal, and a Bible salesman; and finally she makes the struggle against their vocations as prophets the major action that...
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