The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter [Hardcover]

Ruthann Knechel Johansen (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press; First edition (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0817307176
• ISBN-13: 978-0817307172
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,560,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reviews O'Connor's use of the archetypal trickster to contrast modern material-rationalist views of reality with myth/folklore, July 28, 2008

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R. Neil Scott "Writer, Professor & User Servi... (Murfreesboro, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter (Hardcover)

Examines the structural elements and narrative methods Flannery O'Connor employs "to create her fictional landscape." Focuses on her use of the archetypal trickster as "a likely guide through [her] landscape and interpreter of her narrative secret."

Discusses the characteristics, importance, and utility for her "artistic and religious purposes" of the trickster figure. Suggests that these figures not only link her stories "with diverse literatures but also open a discourse between twentieth-century material-rationalist interpretations of reality and ancient folklore and myth."

Focuses on five "narrative devices through which O'Connor shapes the structures of stories" in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, including, her use of: backwoods speech juxtaposed to biblical allusions; incantation; doubled characters who embody the shadows and contradictions of innocence and experience; circular narrative structures; and, her use of "ambiguous figures who move from the fringes to the center of action" to transform characters.

Discusses how she uses "techniques of indirection" to create tension. Then, explores: the unpredictable and uneven role of her narrators and the challenges they pose for critics; "how the shifting narrative voice assists "the mediations of the trickster"; her use of "as if"; and, use of irony, "which makes it possible to hold apparently contradictory perceptions simultaneously."

Juxtaposes Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away to review the variety of literary devices shes uses to animate the structure of her fiction, and reviews "the principle of analogy" to explore "how the very structures of her novels are animated by her metaphysical views of the Incarnation."

Johansen completed a Ph.D. dissertation with this same title at Drew University in 1983.

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University