A Good Writer is Easy to Find: OConnor - Essay Example

A Good is Easy to Find "in a lecture at Rollins College in 1962, insisting that the basic assumptions underlying her stories are the central Christian mysteries, sin, redemption, grace, salvation, and adding that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which [the stories] could be read, but none other by which [they] could have been written." (Murphy 416). This is exactly where we can find this writer in her works. Whether or not she had doubts or reservations concerning her Catholic religion, she was a true southerner from the “bible belt”. If we are to understand O’Connor’s stories, and more importantly, her characters, we must understand something of her. It was not so much what she believed that was important, but what her characters believed. All her stories are explorations of the somewhat grotesque, in the literary sense, characters that she saw all around her. Flannery O’Connor died quite young from complications of Lupus, a disease that also killed her father. She probably suffered a great deal more than she ever let anyone know. After all, she was also very practical, and complaining when there is no help to be had would have seemed a waste of effort, when some days it was likely all she could do to get from one place to another. All of her characters suffer for her, or maybe even through her. O’Connor’s stories seem to me to be very closely aligned with a child between the “age of reason” (about 7) and the age at which she begins to understand (around puberty) the world and herself. The child (O’Connor) is playing a game of “house” with a custom made set of dolls and dollhouse. Where we see this author is not in the action details of her stories, but in her people and their inner turmoil. For example, in a Good Man is Hard to Find, the Grandmother who talks all about how she wants to be perceived as genteel, even if they should have an accident and die is anything but genteel, a synonym for gentle/ Everything is about her from the beginning of the story to the end, when she begs only for her own life after being the probable cause of the deaths of her family. It was she that had to talk about the mystery house that took them where the encountered the Misfit and his boys. It was her that had to bring along an uncaged cat that caused the accident. Most people in her position would be devastated by the idea of living through the deaths of their entire family, but would likely have found a way to endure and would likely have told the story “ad nauseoum” to anyone trapped in her vicinity. We also see just a tiny slice of the misfit’s brief discomfort as he is forced to kill this family, because they were recognized, as he comments, “life has ‘no pleasure but meanness’” and he takes umbrage when one of the boys characterizes the killing as “fun”. O’Connor’s own adult life had little physical pleasure at all, so she might have searched for some kind of meaning in pain (Murphy 416). After all, the Catholic dogma does place redemptive value on pain. Friedman points out that Martha Stevens in her book on O’Connor focuses most of her energy on the delicately balanced tonal dilemmas in the work and seems to think it has its origins in O’Connmor’s struggle of faith between the Catholic view and the humanistic, not quite Christian view of life. It certainly shows up in her characters and the twist of her plots. Armstrong calls O’Connor’s life deeply intellectual and spiritual and discusses the various theories, some quite ridiculous, in her biography. Armstrong notes that the owners of O’Connor’s papers refuse to leave them open to use as fodder for the public or as support for any criticism. While that is sad in one way, it does leave us to look most carefully at what is the most important part of any artistic person, the work. After reading most of O’Connor’s short fiction I have to agree with the author herself, when she said, "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures"("The Fiction Writer and His Country," Mystery and Manners, p. 34). (Hall) However, I would take it one step further and state that her work was also her way of exploring what she believed, and she certainly knew people who shared some of these beliefs. In fact, if we include all of the people who influenced her, all of her beliefs were shared by someone, and she demonstrated this in her work, but she kept that a secret that she may, or may not, have admitted in private. However, the evidence is in her work. All of O’Connor’s plots are surprising, and her saints and villains are never pure. They are all stumbling through minefields of faith and spirituality toward that hoped for understanding that few ever achieve. The irony in “Everything that Rises Must Converge” that some very egalitarian and motherly part of the mother’s character is responsible for her being knocked down before she dies. It is the black woman’s racist response to what was a small gesture to a child that prompts the incident. O’Connor’s habit of analogical matching has been pointed out many times and it can be clearly observed in all of the action in her plots. However, in this story the parallels are very visible indeed. The parallels are sometimes reversed in her plots, as in this story where Julian becomes an impotent leftover, surviving her death after she redeems herself with an act borne of simple care for children, while the racist reaction of the child’s mother is what prompts he fall and death. Interesting is that O’Connor chose to have Julian identified as a typewriter salesman who “wants to be a writer”. Is this where O’Connor can be found? Did she worry about her vocation after all? Works Cited Armstrong, Julie Buckner. "Flannery OConnor: A Life." Southern Quarterly 41.2 (2003): 156+. Questia. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. Friedman, Melvin J. "Flannery OConnor: The Tonal Dilemma." The Southern Literary Journal 6.2 (1974): 124+. Questia. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. Murphy, John J. "Flannery O Connor (1925–1964)." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant and Lawrence Graver. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 419. Questia. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. ---. "Flannery O Connor (1925–1964)." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. Ed. Blanche H. Gelfant and Lawrence Graver. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. 419. Questia. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. Read More