O'Connor, Flannery - Joseph Zornado (essay date summer 1997)

Joseph Zornado (essay date summer 1997)

SOURCE: Zornado, Joseph. “A Becoming Habit: Flannery O'Connor's Fiction of Unknowing.” Religion & Literature 29, no. 2 (summer 1997): 27-59.

[In the following essay, Zornado explores the relationship between O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith and her art and finds parallels between her literary sensibilities and those of Thomas Merton.]

Its almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively.

—Flannery O'Connor, Habit [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor] 144

Much of Flannery O'Connor's fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility. In fact, O'Connor's fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and...

[The entire page is 15608 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass