Analysis Of Two Ears, Three Lucks By Grace Paley

Mary Flannery O’Connor is considered one of the most successful short story writers in history. She composed her works during a period of prosperity and economic boom following World War II. Although the economy was thriving, the 1950’s were a period of struggle for women’s rights, as well as other minorities. (Digital History) Based on her success, one could conclude O’Connor exceeded all barriers against women during the fifties. Flannery O’Connor’s life experiences based on her faith, her novels, and the time period of the 1950’s contribute to her unique writing style.

cannot change life. She writes about her take on living through how people have a

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."—Flannery O'Connor.

In the early 1900’s the relationship between society and God had drastically changed. After witnessing the horrors of the Great War many came to believe that it was impossible for a God to exist in such a brutal world. This type of thinking quickly spread through the United States, touching every single form of art along the way. New authors emerged all writing about the death of God and the new world. The Godless world became the norm, and one of the writers who challenged this norm was Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor was a devoted catholic author whose stories gained popularity during the southern gothic era. In her response to the post God is dead world, O’Connor focused many of her stories on religious ideas, especially the moment of grace. She believed that everyone would have a chance at this moment and that it would be their final chance at salvation. In order to spread her religious ideas O’Connor injected moments of grace into stories such as: “ A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, “ Everything That Rises Must Converge”, “Good Country People”, “ The Displaced Person”, and “ The Lame Shall Enter First”.

Flannery O’Connor said herself, “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy” (Pg.351). She sees her actual life as bland and uninteresting, but her books are written with a whole different and exciting perspective in a whole new world. For example, “ The world she created in her stories is populated with bratty children, malcontent, incompetents, pious frauds, bewildered intellectuals, deformed cynics, rednecks, hucksters, racists, prevents, and murderers”(Pg. 351). The world that is pictured in her books often shock and surprise the readers. Her books are a dark version of the world, full of surprises, crimes, and

Flannery O’Connor introduces her reader’s too unique short stories. They are “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, having too similar characters in different setting, but with the same symbolic meaning. The comparison between Hugla from “Good Country People” to the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to find” is interesting, because they both suffer the same fate. In every short story O’Connor has created a intellectual individual who comes to a realization that their beliefs in there ability to control their lives and the lives of other are false. They enviably become the vulnerable, whereas they assumed it would be different. O’Connor has placed two misguide characters, that deem themselves to be manipulative and compulsive. At the end up of each short story they become vulnerable. Hugla from “Good Country People” and the grandmother from “A Good

Feminism and Historicism play a major part in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Good Country People”, first published in 1955. The story focuses on the importance of identity and the parallels between truth and deception. In “Good Country People”, the Hopewell family, maintain a small farm in rural Georgia with the help of tenants the Freemans. The pious Mrs. Hopewell’s mottos ‘nothing is perfect’ and ‘it takes all kinds to make the world’ are manifested in her unmarried thirty-two year old daughter, Joy who later changes her name to Hulga, wears a prosthetic wooden leg because of a childhood accident. Hulga who has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, cannot advance her academic aspirations because of a weak heart; because of this she must live in her

In this essay I will be covering the similarities, differences, and uniqueness of theme in three of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. The stories I will be discussing are A Good Man is Hard to Find, Revelation, and Good Country People. O’Connor was considered to be a type of religious propaganda. At least one character in her stories had a name or behavior that reflected religion. Her stories most often had an aggressive twist to them. The epiphany in her stories basically always arose from the violent and aggressive twist.

Flannery O’Connor was fond of saying, “When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.” O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, but spent the bulk of her life in Milledgeville, and it is her Southern heritage that influenced her and made her writing extremely distinctive in the history that is American literature. As a Roman Catholic in the Protestant-majority South, she was often confronted with the differences between the surroundings and herself, a theme that often comes up in her writing. O’Connor was diagnosed with Lupus, an inherited disease that also killed her father, so she was constantly aware of her own impending death. It is because of this that so many of her fiction short stories have to do with death and the grace that

Flannery O’Connor was an American author who often wrote about characters who face violent situations. These situations force the characters into a moment of crisis that awakens or alters their fate. Her short stories reflect her Roman Catholic faith and frequently discuss questions of morality and ethics. O’Connor’s Catholic upbringing influenced most of her short stories, often accumulating criticism because of her harsh portrayal of religion. O’Connor incorporates the experience of a moment of grace in her short stories to contribute to the meaning of her works and to represent her faith.

Grace Lee Boggs was born in Providence, R.I., to Chinese immigrants in 1915, Boggs studied at Barnard College and went on to earn her Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. For years, she pored over the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx, and even translated three of Marx's essays from German to English. She was fascinated by the process and challenge of thinking through complicated ideas. She developed a passion for marxism and other people of those beliefs in college. She was also very hardworking. Her dedication and inspiration for the complicated ideas from these famous people were building blocks for her development as a great writer. After finishing grad school, Boggs struggled to find work — any work, she told a group of students in 2012. "Even department stores would say, 'We don't hire Orientals,' " she recalled. So she moved to the Midwest, where she found a job with the University of Chicago's philosophy library. It paid only $10 a week, a stipend so low she was forced to find free housing in a rat-filled basement. But even the rats had an upside. One day, as Boggs was walking through her neighborhood, she came across a group of people

That both genders have common ground as people. She goes on to describe how society is becoming more progressive, that whether or not people want to admit it, changes are coming and as time goes on women will be granted more equality. This change was already being seen but just needed further progression.

of growing up, and the affects war has on her life and love. As it is

Best known for her remarkable short fiction, Katherine Anne Porter is categorized as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. Born in Indian Creek Texas in 1890, Callie Russell Porter was exposed to many events of turmoil in her early years as a child. Throughout most of her personal life she has experienced a great deal of instability, difficulty, and chaos. A new found success in her works as an author also accompanied the instability she continued to endure. Porter incorporated useful themes into her writing: betrayal, death, origin of human evil, and the unforgiving nature of man. Her overall writing style includes techniques of irony, symbolism, and memory. In 1966, she was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and also the National Book Award for the The Collected Stories which included “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”. This short story in particular shares similar themes exhibited in the author’s life: denial, loss abandonment, guilt, and above all, determination. Katherine Anne Porter’s tumultuous life had an obvious impact on her work as a fictional short story writer.

She had little schooling, but she had run businesses. She had managed on her own, with a husband and sons, in a country that didn’t care for her or her culture, but only for their aggrandized version of it. Her experiences were rightful cause to be jaded and hard, and yet she saw brightness and she saw brightness in me. She saw the great things in life, she loved hard and appreciated the little things — us going for a walk together or just sitting in the sun on a warm day.