Religion in the Works of Flannery OConnor Essay -- Biography Biograph

Religion in the Works of Flannery OConnor Religion is a pervasive theme in most of the literary works of the late Georgia writer Flannery OConnor. Four of her short stories in particular deal with the relationship between Christianity and society in the Southern give-and-take Belt A devout Man Is Hard to Find, The River, Good Country People, and Revelation. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. believes that the mixture of the primitive fundamentalism of her region, and the Roman Catholicism of her faith . . . makes her religious metaphor both well-refined and entertaining (70-71). OConnors stories give a grotesque and often stark vision of the clash between traditional Southern Christian values and the ever-changing social scene of the twentieth century. Three of the main religious ingredients that lend to this effect are the presence of presage meanings, revelations of divinity fudge, and the struggle between the powers of Satan and God. The divine symbols in OConnors works tend to be mostly apocalyptic in nature, exhibiting drastic cases of societal breakdown in a religious context, but occasionally, they express prophetic hope. John Byars states that She presents two contradictory images of society in most of her fiction one in which the power and prevalence of evil seem so deeply embedded that only destruction whitethorn root it out, and another in which the community or even an aggregate of individuals, though radically flawed, may discover within itself the potential for regeneration. (34) In all four of the mentioned stories, this presence of Christian signs-of-the-times can be seen. Set in the early fifties, A Good Man Is Hard to Find tells of the murder of a vacationing Georgia family by an escaped felon called the Misfit. ... ...Norman. Dostoevskian Vision in Flannery OConnors Revelation. The Flannery OConnor Bulletin 16 (1987) 16-22. OConnor, Flannery. The Complete Stories of Flannery OConnor. New York Farrar, 1990. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. Flannery OConnor and the Bible Belt. The Added Dimension The Art and Mind of Flannery OConnor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York Fordham UP, 1966. 49-71. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Flannery OConnors Testimony. The Added Dimension The Art and Mind of Flannery OConnor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York Fordham UP, 1966. 138-56. Spivey, Ted R. Flannery OConnors View of God and Man. Flannery OConnor. Ed. Robert E. Reiter. St. Louis B. Herder, 1966. 111-18. Wood, Ralph C. Flannery OConnor, Martin Heidegger, and Modern Nihilism. The Flannery OConnor Bulletin 21 (1992) 100-18.