Customer Reviews

Flannery O'Connor

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McFarland discusses Flannery O'Connor's artistic concern with "how the realm of the Holy interpenetrates this world and affects it." Comments that her use of the grotesque serves as "an offshoot of the fictional form that Hawthorne designated as 'romance' to distinguish it from the traditional novel." Remarks that O'Connor's use evokes "a world empty of meaning" and expresses "the incommensurability between the divine and the human."

Discusses the style, techniques, themes, characters, and mystery found in O'Connor's stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Offers an explication of the title story which focuses on how she reveals "the hollowness of the protagonist's conventional understanding of order, of destroying the conventional order," and how she suggests "the existence of a profound but appallingly demanding order beneath it." Offers less detailed analyses of the other stories in the collection.

Sees the stories in O'Connor's second collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, as reflecting her interest in Teilhard de Chardin's hypothesis that "evolution, far from stopping with the emergence of homo sapiens, continues to progress toward higher levels of consciousness." Notes that her characters in these stories "typically resist this kind of rising and the spiritual convergence with others that accompanies it."

Finds that while her novel, Wise Blood, is "strong and strikingly original," it is also a bizarre novel with a "starkness of style and flatness of characterization" that prevent it from being easily accessible. Outlines the novel's plot and discusses how "despite his protestations of disbelief in Jesus, Haze is nevertheless obsessed with him." Discusses how his "condition" of not having a home and his fierce commitment "to the belief that he has no soul" affect his actions throughout the novel. Includes a discussion of the role of vision in her novel, and how the ending "reflects Haze's progress from alienation, isolation, and imprisonment," to a final stage of union -- through death -- with God.

Outlines the plot of The Violent Bear It Away and explores the motivation for Tarwater's actions. Contrasts his efforts to transform himself "completely into a mechanical man" in the beginning and middle of the novel with the focused and determined prophet he has become by the end.

Closes with a comparison of the two novels, and concludes that both embody "a paradox in that their theological content is offset by a tone that begins in comedy and becomes increasingly dark, violent, and horrifying."

Suggests in closing that O'Connor viewed herself "as a prophet," with her art serving as the medium for her "prophetic message."

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University