Flannery O ' Connor 's Writing Style

“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are two short stories written by Flannery O’Connor during her short lived writing career. Despite the literary achievements of O’Connor’s works, she is often criticized for the grotesqueness of her characters and endings of her short stories and novels. Her writings have been described as “understated, orderly, unexperimental fiction, with a Southern backdrop and a Roman Catholic vision, in defiance, it would seem, of those restless innovators who preceded her and who came into prominence after her death”(Friedman 4). “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are both set in the South, and O’Connor explores the tension between the old and new South. The stories are tow

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.

The short story "Greenleaf" shows us some of the central themes of Flannery O'Connor's literary work.

Flannery O’Conner, a Gothic literature writer, has written several short stories throughout her life. Among these stories, two of them being A Good Man is Hard to Find and Good Country People, she has included some of the most fleshed out and grotesque characters I have ever read. O’Conner brings her characters to life throughout her writing in near flawless and subtle detail with ironic humor. For example, O’Conner makes skillful use of ironic names for her characters. The titles and names such as grandmother, the misfit, Joy/Hulga, and the bible salesman are used ironically. These subtle characterizations help guide the reader to the final, and often times ironic, conclusions all her characters deserve.

Brutality, humor, religion, and violence are a few themes portrayed throughout many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. In many of her short stories, O’Connor exposes the dark side of human nature and implements violent and brutal elements in order to emphasize her religious viewpoints. In the short stores “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Revelation”, O’Connor explicitly depicts this violence to highlight the presence and action of holy grace that is given to a protagonist who exudes hypocritical qualities.

O’Connor borrowed these characteristics from her life and used them in the complex characters she would later create. Her Catholic faith is another point that drove O’Connor’s writing, especially given that she grew up in a Protestant-majority region. “Flannery O'Connor put much conscious thought into her dual role of Catholic and fiction writer” (Galloway). Her devout faith plays a huge role in her writing, as most of her characters grapple with salvation and grace. O’Connor’s influences in life were so powerful, they became the same topics that impacted her philosophy in writing.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" also uses its setting to explore place and heritage to give us better insight into the actions and feelings of the characters. Julian, living in a poor neighborhood with his mother, shortly after the integration of blacks to public transportation, struggles to get his mother to understand that the world has changed. No longer are there huge plantations with hundreds of slaves, in fact "there are no more slaves." Once fashionable neighborhoods, like the one in

To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.

Fear is a dreadful emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous. Such emotions cause pain, or a threat. Flannery O'Connor's writing style is best described as 'southern gothic', a style of literature that has flawed and disturbed characters in sinister situations. Her writing explores the collision of religion and morality. Joyce Carol Oates writing portraits individuals whose obsessive lives end in bloodshed and self-destruction. Her writing blends a realistic treatment of everyday life with horrific and even sensational depictions of violence. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, are two short stories with different plot lines but similar

“Everything That Rises must converge”, by Flannery O’ Connor is sometimes considered a comical but also serious tale of a grown man named Julian, who lives with mother, who happens to be your typical southern woman. The era unfolds in a couple years after integration begins. Throughout the story, O’Connor impresses us with her derived message in which people often resist to growing away from bigotry towards self-awareness and love for all humankind, which is so necessary for life to converge in equality. O’Connor has a distinctive style of writing that expresses this message through characterization, conflict and literary devices.

When reading “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Conner, most of us will readily agree that it is a story about a young man and his mother. Where this agreement usually ends is when we ask if this was O’Conner’s intended theme. Whereas some are convinced that the relationship between mother and child is the main theme, others maintain that O’Conner was focusing on these characters adapting to social change during the Civil Rights era. I agree with the latter, that the central conflict of the story is that of social change and how both the old and new generations adapt to these changes.

Flannery O 'Connor wrote as a Catholic and a Southerner, commonly writes about epiphanies and redemption. Flannery O’Connor writes about characters that aren’t quite following the right path, but continue their life believing they are. Her background as a catholic can be seen in her writing, she believes in epiphany, “epiphany that results in resurrection and rebirth” (Keil par. 4). She is a talented writer, who wrote about many different literary elements. The main characters in the stories are wandering believers on journeys to find redemption. Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) and “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965) both contain a traveling setting within which both include characters that similarly travel on a journey of redemption, using characterization, symbolism, and irony to show the absurdity of human behavior.

Upon initially reading Flannery O’Connor’s work, one would have no problem recognizing her use of shocking, violent, or despairing themes. It may not be as easy, however, to completely accept or understand her style. According to Patrick Galloway, one must be “initiated to her trademarks when reading any of her two novels or thirty-two short stories (1).In many of her works, she paradoxically uses styles that are grotesque and brutal to illustrate themes of grace and self-actualization. As O’Connor herself says, “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to

Human conflict is going to happen in the world no matter the situation. It is sought out to resolve these matters without tragic aftermath, but in some cases that cannot be so. Flannery O’Conner writes two short stories “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” using characterization, setting, and irony to show the racial and egotistic ways of the 1950s and 60s in the South. The theme of race is awoken through the violent self-realization moments main characters experience. Comparing these two pieces of work through characters, setting, and ironic subtleties shows how both can be related to one another.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” is a short story that takes place in a southern town after the buses have become desegregated. A son, named Julian, and his mother are going to a recreational center because the mother has been told she must lose weight. While riding the bus, the mother makes racists comments about the desegregation of busses since the Civil Rights Act. During the ride, a black man gets on the bus and she ceases her racist comments momentarily. All the while, her son is thinking about how even though he we went to a second-rate college, he has a first-rate education; and even though he was raised in a house that has very traditionalist values, he still can hold himself to a more progressive moral standard. The bus stops again, and a black woman and her child board the bus. While exiting the bus, Julian’s mom tries to give the little boy a penny, and the mother swings her purse and hits her in the head. This causes Julian’s mother to have a seizure and die. Flannery O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge," shows the differing of opinions between generation and touches on social issues regarding race in the south during the 1950's.