Flannery O'Connor

A writer in the Southern Gothic style, Flannery O'Connor departs from other writers of this genre in several ways. Violence as a means of redemption While Gothic writers of the South often...

The above answer has addressed the question very thoroughly, so I will try to get at some core issues in both stories. In short, I would argue that while both are evil characters, Manley Pointer is...

Both women realize that life is not as it seems and that the many of their ways were wrong and pointless. The protagonist in "Revelation" was rather rude and elitist and by the end of...

Manley Pointer and the Misfit are both morally dubious characters who nevertheless bring about a spiritual re-evaluation in the protagonist of their respective stories. In "Good Country People,"...

Flannery O’Connor often uses violence in her stories for a number of reasons. In the first place, O’Connor felt that most human beings, at least in the modern era, live complacent, comfortable,...

In all—or almost all—of O'Connor's stories, one of her characters has a moment of revelation or illumination, when the grace of God breaks into this person's life and shows a glimpse of God's love...

Flannery O’Connor’s Roman Catholic beliefs color her stories which include violence and violent people alongside the faith and grace found by many of her characters. “Good Country People” and...

The short story "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" by Flannery O'Connor tells of the visit of two 14-year-old girls, Susan and Joanne, to the home of a 12-year-old girl, referred to only as "the child"...

Flannery O’Connor believed she had to use violence to shock people into paying attention to her themes. She said in her letters that "if the Christian faith is present, readers will understand the...

In Edora Welty's “Petrified Man” and Flannery O'Connor's “Good Country People,” the characters operate on the conviction that appearance and reality are essentially the same; this conviction...

A story which has nothing to offer someone with no religious faith cannot have much to offer even those who do have faith. The fact that this question is asked of Flannery O'Connor at all is at...

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the thematic irony is built around the disparity between the grandmother's view of herself and the reality. She feels that what defines a "good man" is the kind of...

The views of Mrs. Hopewell from "Good Country People" and the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" toward religion are most likely similar, but the approach of the two women are somewhat...

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor illustrates the theme that God's grace can fall on any of us. The grandmother, a manipulative, narrow-minded, difficult person, might be the last person...

In her analyses of O'Connor earlier short stories' use of spatiality, Louise Westling observes there is a "strong sense of place despite the absence of a geopolitical region", and characters are...

One thing that "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" have in common is the theme of innocence versus corruption. Both share this notion of "good country people," a kind of myth...

Although Julian's mother is racist—believing that African Americans ought to succeed, but only on "their side of the fence"—she is not vicious. She is condescending and wrong, certainly, but she...

A great deal of O'Connor's characterization has, obviously, to do with her own approach to life and her search for meaning through the relatively difficult portions of her life. They are described...

In her "Christ-haunted" South, Flannery O'Connor encountered many faith-based Christians who, in their horror of sin, shielded themselves with sanctimony from their own faults. One character who...

Flannery O'Connor once wrote that she lived in the "Christ-haunted South." That is, O'Connor found herself in an area of evangelicals and their horror of sin which is part of the "landscape," while...

Similarities and differences exist between many characters in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, including between Claude and Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” and the grandmother and The Misfit in “A Good Man...

O'Connor uses nature as a buffer between what appears to be and what really is. As a Christian believer, O'Connor sees beyond nature (the sun, clouds, and sky) to see the supernatural (God,...

My personal favorite story is "Everything that Rises Must Converge". Prejudice meets contempt and one person's narrowness is trumped by the next person's bias. The task of escaping bigotry and...

I returned this question to you and am glad you clarified it. Since you are writing on Flannery O'Connor rather than a specific work she wrote, one way to begin would be to investigate what...

The first part of the sentence it seems to have words missing; the first clause, "The factor of violence always presents in Flannery O'Connor's stories," clearly is missing its predicate. Perhaps,...

Reading O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a start for your understanding of how violence leads to salvation. You may also wish to read some criticisms of this story and others as well as...

Flannery O'Connor has been called many things religious: a Christian humanist, a sacramental writer, a fundamentalist, a Yahwist, a mean Christian, and my favorite, a "Roman Catholic not like a...

The identification of “southern writer” may be applied to any author who lives in, sets their works in, or writes about characters who hail from the US South. It is often applied to those authors...

Flannery O’Connor was a deeply devout Roman Catholic and wrote from an obviously Christian (and particularly Catholic) perspective when she became an adult author. Yet she seems to have been a...

Flannery O'Connor was truly a genius and an extremely gifted writer. I think that there are two major things in her life that influenced her writing; her religion and her disease. She was a very...

Technically, four characters are named in the story: Mrs. Turpin, Claude, Mary Grace, and Miss Finley. However, Miss Finley is a character with a momentary appearance of no consequence whatsoever,...

Perhaps O’Connor’s own words can help you come up with a subtitle. In her letters, O’Connor wrote: “I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call “A Good Man” brutal and sarcastic. The stories...

Both of these stories by Flannery O'Connor are social critiques set in a changing American South, and both feature an elderly female protagonist who is in some way struggling with social change. In...

O'Connor depicts the South in her stories as backwards place populated by unsophisticated people who are behind the times. Many of her characters are what are called grotesques, because O'Connor...

Two goals O'Connor had in her stories are as follows: first, God's grace is bigger than whatever horror faces us; and second, God can profoundly touch the lives of very flawed people. In other...