[Some] of O'Connor's public experiences, first in the guerilla war and then in the Civil War, serve as a clear inspiration to some sixteen stories, most of which appear in his collection Guests of the Nation. In these stories, he argues the meaning of these experiences, seeking to express, artistically, the reaction of his countrymen to the agonies at the birth of their nation.

This collection, O'Connor carefully notes, was originally written "under the influence of the great Jewish story teller Isaac Babel," by which, he means, of course, Babel's Red Cavalry. Yet that O'Connor, who read widely in European literature, should, of all authors, come under the influence of Babel is not, on further reflection, at all surprising. For, in both these collections, we perceive "the writer's intention to create a form which shall in itself be shapely and autonomous and at the same time unusually responsible to the truth of external reality, the truth of things and events." The truth of the events, it should be added, inescapably contains moral issues with which both artists were, personally, deeply involved.

One of the prime moral issues for many in war, we know, is not whether one can endure being killed, but whether one can endure killing. Though neither Babel nor O'Connor could endure killing, they were, nevertheless, greatly interested in the impulse to violence which seems innate in all men. (pp. 31-2)

O'Connor, like Babel, [placed] … war and peace, violence and repose, side by side to show man's unending dilemma in having to choose between the two, though fascinated by both. (p. 33)

Not only does war reveal to man the "unreality" of his fascination with violence, but also, O'Connor suggests in many of the stories in Guests of the Nation, war shows man how removed the real is from the ideal; however widening is the gap between what actually is happening or has happened to his hopes and plans and what he thought he was fighting for. This situation troubled O'Connor terribly…. (pp. 33-4)

Far more disillusioning for O'Connor than the ever-widening gap between the ideal and the real, resulting, in part, from a war that was a "cruel," silly thing, is the fact that many of his countrymen also lost the meaning of honor, decency, and fair play. And nowhere is this more powerfully revealed than in "Guests of the Nation." (p. 35)

This tale touches the reader not only because of its intrinsic beauty and power but also because it shows O'Connor's understanding of man's nature, especially when man loses all sense of self and his humanity. Above all, it has a universality, the ultimate achievement in fiction, because it transcends the bounds of time and space…. "Duty," as O'Connor projects it in the stories, becomes a shield for monstrous acts of evil—and all because of man's failure to see as O'Connor does what abstract terms or forces, or even dispassionate governments, can do, and often actually succeed in doing to his moral nature. Reading "Guests of the Nation," the sensitive reader actually feels "lost" and "astray in the snow."

But not every narrator in O'Connor's war stories, one must hasten to add, is led astray. Nor is every character bedevilled by his own inhumanity and coldness. Nor does every protagonist feel the dark power of melancholy surging within him. There are forces in the lives of men which help them retain their humanity, sanity, and probity. One such force in man is, of course, love. (pp. 35-6)

[In] all of his stories, O'Connor's humor consists essentially of his rare ability to see simultaneously the dual aspects of life—good and evil, love and hate, peace and war, the beautiful and the ugly. In other words, his humor in the "synthetical fusion of opposites, the gift of saying two things in one, of showing shine and shadow together." (p. 38)

[The] disgust with all that he saw happening to his country and countrymen may well explain why O'Connor, like, say, Yeats and Joyce and O'Casey, "had long ago decided that Ireland was morally bound to live up to his expectations." That may also explain why these giants carried on a life-long lover's quarrel with their country, with its "introverted religion" and "introverted politics." But since Ireland, for them, never did live up to their expectations, they were at ease with it only in their poems, plays, and stories. In them, they could weep and laugh, often doing both simultaneously.

And if O'Connor, like some of his contemporaries, found the political life of his country difficult to bear, it is clearly evident that in his stories of war and revolution he was, at least artistically, at ease. And these stories, on careful reading, are irresistibly interesting, precisely because "O'Connor loved those from whom he was alienated." Loving them, he naturally placed them prominently in his art. (p. 40)

What O'Connor observed and then recorded in his stories about the servants of God and the servants of the servants of God, such as their housekeepers, is rich in understanding, meaning, and humor. That he had early renounced his formal relationship with religion did not prejudice him, in his extended writings, against the Irish clergy. In point of fact, it gave him a certain objectivity not always available to the committed. These servants—bishops, parish priests, and curates—appear in O'Connor's stories as subject to the same strains and stresses in all their dedication to the "higher" life as those involved in the "lower" life. And the description of the priests that finally emerges from these stories, therefore, contains a keen insight not only into the Irish priest's professional posture but also his own personality. At times these two elements in his nature are in a conflict which gives added meaning to the artistic quality of the tales. (p. 50)

O'Connor [also] depicts in his art some of the ambivalent phenomena of Irish family life. Not only was his lively intelligence engaged in portraying the religious and political life of his countrymen, but also the difficult and tragic conditions prevailing in their homes and personal lives. Hence, in his two novels—The Saint and Mary Kate and Dutch Interior—and in, at least, some seventy-odd short stories based on family life, he conveys a feeling of sadness or despair or a mournful note of frustration mingled, as always, with humor and irony. The disarray of Irish domestic relations is central to O'Connor's writing. (p. 65)

That the young lovers in Ireland could not enjoy an easy love relationship troubled O'Connor. With deepest roots in his native land, he was disturbed by the conditions that converted the pleasures of love into a battle of the sexes. Among these conditions were … the restrictive teachings of the church. Hence, when he wrote the first of his two novels, at the beginning of his career, he entitled it appropriately The Saint and Mary Kate. There, as in many short stories, he set the stage for the conflict between two "innocents," who, seeking the joys of friendship and marriage, are frustrated by the church's "thunderings" against the "dangers" of sex. To his disapproval of these "thunderings" O'Connor added his disgust with the pervasive influence of the ubiquitous Irish mother. (p. 74)

What O'Connor is anxious to relate in this sad tale of two young Irish lovers [Mary Kate and Phil] is, among other things, that neither is prepared against the "wolf of life." (p. 75)

Religious life in Ireland, O'Connor clearly implies, with its exaggerated rigor produced inhibited characters like Phil Dirnan. The whole body of clerical and lay thought is given to penitential excesses because the conception of sin—especially inherent in courtship—is everywhere. Part of the tragedy of life in Ireland is that people seem to have lost the feeling and craving for life itself. (pp. 75-6)

One cannot, however, help observe that something more profound troubled O'Connor as he portrayed Mary Kate and Phil in the agony of their courtship. He would have us understand that they represent something more than two lovers unable to meet on common ground…. Mary Kate becomes, for O'Connor, the symbol of the artist, nay, the "pagan," who desires the pleasures of this world far more than the next, the now rather than the hereafter. Phil is the exact opposite. Together, they seem to symbolize those two aspects of the Irish mind that have been, ever since Celtic times, "in constant conflict, namely, pagan immorality and Christian morality."

What we have in this novel, then, are two people who seem to represent vehicles of that eternal struggle between fruitful humanism and ascetic practice, between Christian morality and pagan immorality, between the sacred and the profane. (pp. 76-7)

[Much] of O'Connor's writing on marriage and family life expresses a belief that the vast number of men and women going through life in barren and witless celibacy—all because of the church's thundering on the terrible danger of keeping company, of the easy, happy pursuits of friendship—is weird and unnatural. Unless the beauty and dignity of marriage are presented clearly and unmistakably by the church, schools, teachers, and other shapers of public opinion, the bachelor and spinster mores of Ireland will, O'Connor implies, forever doom the young to remain "naked to the wolf of life."

Ireland's failure to remove a quasi-monasticism from secular life in order to allow for a mutual understanding of the sexes, especially during the formative years, is the theme also of O'Connor's only other novel, Dutch Interior. If somewhat less successful structurally than The Saint and Mary Kate, Dutch Interior is no less revealing of the nature and destiny of Irish life. For O'Connor's persistent concern—central, in fact, to all his fiction—with the relations of parents and children, with religion, love, and the flight of young people from their native soil is evident in this work. Had he chosen, however, to narrow his attention to one major crisis, as in The Saint and Mary Kate, O'Connor might have been more effective. What we get [in Dutch Interior] is a series of sketches of middle-class Irish people, drawn together by the fact that they live in the same small town. To be sure, these characters might serve as a microcosm of Irish life. But one cannot escape the conclusion that a central conflict, so necessary to all fiction, is not clearly discernible here. This novel appears too ambitious. O'Connor seems to be attempting a far larger fictional study of Irish society than he can possibly execute. There are gaps—at times, huge gaps—in the story where he just can't come to grips with the need, according to his own views, to delineate the role of the individual in that society. The individual characters seem somehow lost and it is only when he concentrates on the immediate relations between members of the Devane and Dalton families—a thing he does supremely well in his short fiction—that he succeeds if only partially, in this work. Unlike his short stories, he fails to write simply in this novel. As a result, Dutch Interior is the least satisfying of his two less than satisfactory novels. (pp. 81-2)