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Evil And Suffering In Flannery O Connor

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Questions that may cross Flannery O’Connor mind are questions like, why does evil and suffering exist? Is there a purpose for going through evil and suffering? What is the purpose of going through things that cause such feelings? Or what can be gained, if anything, through evil and suffering? Evil and suffering is subjective based on the person; what I might consider evil may differ from the next person, and my definition of suffering- the way I view suffering will differ from someone else’s state of suffering. Even though interpretations of evil and suffering vary, it doesn’t make one person’s interpretation any better or truer than the next persons. We are all susceptible to evil and suffering, it just varies because of how we perceive and react to this problem. However, the one thing that is consistent through evil and suffering is that everyone can be saved by grace. Flannery O’Conner’s is a southern gothic writer, with a Catholic background that can be seen throughout her writings. Typically, her writings reveal some religious belief and the questions …show more content…

Her story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” brings up the questions, could the villain, The Misfit, also be a victim? Or are the only victims the grandmother and her family? I was able to see The Misfit as being a victim also; although the story does not directly describe him as a victim, I can infer by some of his comments made that he may have been a “victim” in his own life. At one point in the story he talks about how the “head doctor” told him that he killed his father, but he knows that he did no such thing- so maybe he was accused of something he didn’t really do (pg. 130). He continues on to say, “there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip,” that shows that he was given the short end of the stick in life and looked over because he was an “under taker (O’Conner, pg.

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Flannery O’Connor was a southern woman from Georgia with a strong catholic faith. She frequently questioned morality, ethics and classical humanities. In her last story “Revelation” many people believe that there are a lot of religious and philosophical references. In the article “The Unrevealed in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Revelation’” by Jacky Dumas and Jessica Hooten Wilson they believe there are references to Plato’s allegory of the cave and the Old Testament. In Ronald Pepin’s article “Latin names and images of ugliness in Flannery O' Connor's ‘Revelation’” he believes that there is ugliness throughout the story and that the character all have symbolic.

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Equally if not more important would be the other sin both men are guilty of, blasphemy. Blasphemy in simple terms is to believe and act in a way, that one considers themselves higher than God, to whom Christians believe is the ultimate power; in many religions it is a sin that can result in being excommunicated entirely; not too ironically it was what Jesus himself, was accused of and one of the main reasons as to why the Jewish people wanted to kill Him in the first place. Blasphemy is more than simply taking the Lord’s name in vain, as it is in reality a sin of extreme arrogance and pride, because the translation of this sin is to claim that God is wrong and man, who in the hierarchy of things, is a weaker lesser lifeform, knows more than God. Adam was tempted into eating the forbidden fruit which came from the Tree of Knowledge because he believed he deserved to know as much as God.

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Is Ms. Strangeworth a victim OR villain In the short story “The Possibility of Evil” written by Shirley Jackson, the protagonist Ms. Strangeworth is a villain because she isn’t what everyone’s aspect of her is, she is very deceptive, and the letters she sends are the very cause of the evil she’s trying to stop. Ms. Strangeworth is a seventy-one-year-old lady who lives in a little town, which she thinks is her own. She always feels the need to know everything, about everyone. Even though, no one knows who she really is.

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Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood follows Hazel Motes’ attempt to abandon his religious beliefs and establish a “Church Without Christ”. Hazel Motes and many of the characters in Wise Blood seek material prosperity but utilize religion as a means to reach such a goal. This perversion of Christianity for materialistic objectives prevents the characters’ redemption from Christ. Specifically in the case of Motes, it is not until he has lost everything material that he finally accepts Jesus’ divine grace. The grotesque characters exist to display the distortion of moral purpose that materialism brings.

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Wise Blood and The Catholicism By Reem Abbas 43380421 Flannery O’Connor is one of the greatest Southern writers during the twentieth century. She is considered as a faithful and a good Christian writer. In her fiction, she never neglects her Catholic concerns. The large respect for O'Connor’s religion appears in most of her literary works.

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Throughout much of O’Connor’s works, there is this idea that a character needs redemption, as Dorothy Walters suggests in her book, Flannery O’Connor. Walters also states when these characters are enlightened, it is often “through catastrophe.” In O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” this salvation through violence occurs for Joy. Through the evaluation of Joy’s downfalls in character and her misinterpretation of Manley Pointer, Joy has a horrific experience that will forever change her perspective and reform her overconfidence. Before Joy/Hulga even meets Manley Pointer, readers understand that she has a lack of experience in the real world.

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Flannery O’Connor, in her short life, wrote one novel and many short stories that impact literature to this day. She wrote two superb short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Good Country People, which have many similarities hidden in the theme of their complex text. While both stories include themes about religion, identity, and the way we view others, the endings are astoundingly different. Nonetheless, O’Connor’s main theme concerning the way we view other people, is the most significant in both short stories. In Good Country People, Mrs. Hopewell repeatedly states that the bible salesman is the “salt of the earth” meaning that he is just a good and simple country boy.

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Literary Analysis ENG2106 Student name: Li Michaela Bernice Student ID: 4002551 Word count: Grace and sins Flannery O’Connor was a Southern author from America who frequently wrote in a Southern Gothic style and depended vigorously on local settings and bizarre characters. Her works likewise mirrored her Roman Catholic faith and regularly examined questions of morality and ethics. She created violence in the end of both “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to put the stories to the end. She asserted that she has found that violence is strangely capable of returning her characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace, and also violence is the extreme situation that best reveals who

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O’Connor has a specific way of defining and showing grace. She created tales of hypocrisy, sin, and forgiveness that are violent but honest. Often depicting grace as a decision just before death, she shows the harsh reality that one must

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“Her characters, who sometimes accept and other times reject salvation, often have a warped self-image, especially of their moral status and of the morality of their actions” (Hobby). This addresses how some of the important lines in the story describe to the reader about the extreme exaggeration and the psychological realism of the church, which O’Connor wanted to express within her story. The extreme use of exaggeration and how the use of the characters bring a sense of an uncanny feeling of good and evil within each character, portrays how deep the meaning is seen in this short story.  “the story is filled with dark, grotesque humor created largely by the story 's many ironies” (Hobby). The author of this source highly emphasizes that O’Connor creates this dark humor for her characters to build on her meaning in the story and uses irony to create the distortion within her

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Flannery O'Connor was a devoted Catholic, and , as exhibited in most of her stories, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" has Christian themes of redemption and grace. Lucynell Craters, the only innocent character in the story, symbolizes purity and is described as "an angel of Gawd. " Her character acts stop the shifty, self-serving Mr. Shiftlet and help him reach redemption. In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” O’Connor uses religious symbolism to emphasize spiritual struggles between good and evil and how humans are only looking for their own advantage.

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Flannery O’Connor was a “God-conscious writer” she states in one of letters to a young woman in 1955, July 20th; documented by themarginaliam.org. Flannery O’Connor was an orthodox Catholic and disabled, she saw the hypocrisy many Catholics held themselves with and how disabled people were treated. A Good Man Is Hard To Find is a wonderful example of Catholic hypocrisy, showing the grandma seeing herself as a woman of god, “‘If you would pray,’ the old lady said, ‘Jesus would help you.’” The grandma acted as if she did not actually believe in her faith, instead merely embracing the finery it gave her and not genuinely having her religion be a good change in her life and as a person. This supports the thesis because being completely unaware of yourself leads to a person ignoring morality and instead flowing with whatever is the strongest feeling in the moment.

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“The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew.” “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Flannery O’Connor, Page 8. The man that begins to help the family happens to be the criminal on the loose and the grandmother says something as soon as she realizes. The criminal, also known as the Misfit, seems to be threatened when the grandmother realizes who he is.

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This particular quote shows how Flannery O’Connor combined two themes into one concept, by taking the theme of God and Religion and Good vs. Evil and adding that into one character’s personality. O’Connor also shows, in this quote, the theme Good vs. Evil for how the grandmother attempted to convert the misfit to her religion instead of going through with his evil scheme. O’Connor’s writing style was very unique and one of a kind. She carefully drew out every character and theme to match perfection. Flannery O’Connor

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Redemption is the act of being saved from acts of evil and sin. The debate of whether human nature is redeemable or not has been one to plaque religious scholars. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, this question continues in the interactions between the characters; the most notable being the Grandmother of a rather horrible family and the Misfit, a murderer. While on a road trip, these two characters’ paths collide and lead to a rather unfortunate end where the Grandmother and her family are killed. While many readers believe the ending creates and overall negative tone of the story, some believe that there is a hope for redemption; the story’s author O’Connor who is a devoted Catholic included.

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