ipl-logo

Examples Of Flannery O Connor Grotesque

1181 Words5 Pages

Iris Nevers Nevers 1
Mrs. Gobbell
English 2010
26 October 2014 Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque In my paper, I will research Flannery O'Connor and the grotesque religious themes often found in her stories. In the world of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, characters are seldom who we think they are or even who they themselves think they are. O'Connor was an important Southern writer, known for her grotesque characters and gothic style. O'Connor's writings also reflected heavily on her own faith as a Roman Catholic, frequently questioning morality and human faith. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, “Good Country People” and “Revelation” accurately portray these grotesque and religious themes seen throughout her writing. In the short story "Good Country People," O'Connor's selection of names for the characters in this story introduce religion using subtle irony. For example, the name "Hopewell" easily translates to "hope well" and characterizes both the mother …show more content…

One of the so called good country people, Pointer, lulls Hulga to show him how to take off her wooden leg. When she demands for he leg, he "pushes it farther away with his foot," leaving her totally dependent on him (O'Connor 496). This plotting, sinful man is suppose to be one of those innocent, good country people. Pointer states that he doesn't actually believe in the bible, as seen in the following quote: "I hope you don't think I actually believe in this crap! I may sell Bibles but I wasn't born yesterday" (O'Connor 497). This "simple" man talks about his peculiar interest in special things, saying that one time he "got a woman's glass eye this way" (O'Connor 497). Flannery O'Connor's use of grotesque is seen through Hulga's deformity and Pointer's obsession with woman's fake body

Show More
Related

Situational Irony In Manley Pointer

82 Words | 1 Pages

Joy/Hulga affects a cynical façade, claiming not to believe in anything. (As she tells Manley, "I don 't have illusions. I 'm one of those people who sees through to nothing.") Yet by the end of the story, Joy/Hulga 's carefully constructed façade is shattered; through the dramatic irony in her absence of self-awareness to the situational irony pervading the final scene, O 'Connor ultimately reveals Joy/Hulga as an innocent who is shocked when she witnesses the beliefs she once espoused as embodied in Manley

Read More

Good Country People Hulga Character Analysis

1359 Words | 6 Pages

(12). This illustrates how Hulga has had no romantic interactions in her life and is now having her first kiss at the age of 32 with Manley Pointer. Because Pointer was the first person to show interest in Hulga, she allowed herself to be vulnerable to him, and he used that to exploit her. During her childhood and adulthood, she was always looked at with pity and faced judgment and rejection, whether that be her appearance, strength, or attitude by doctors, peers, or her family. In the article, Mrs. Hopewell expresses her pity for Hulga stating “She thought of her [Hulga] still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times.”

Read More

Manley Pointer In Good Country People

820 Words | 4 Pages

At this moment Hulga comes to the realization that Manley Pointer is not all that he seems. Hulga is angry and confused “Her face turned almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. ”(9) Hulga is having trouble comprehending how someone she considers to be far beneath her is able to so easily dupe her.

Read More

Flannery O Connor Wise Blood Analysis

790 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More

Love In Flannery O Connor's Good Country People

890 Words | 4 Pages

It is not until the very end of the story that readers are shown the true character of Manley Pointer. It is possible that the motive for stealing Hulga’s leg is that Mrs. Freeman hired the Bible salesman to steal the artificial leg from her. “Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg” (O’connor 436). It is interesting that

Read More

Good Country People By Flannery O Connor

579 Words | 3 Pages

An illusion is a false sense of reality or a deception of the truth. The beauty industry capitalizes on women every day by promoting products that give the illusion of flawless skin, longer eyelashes, longer hair, bigger bra size, and slimming waist line. Many people can be deceived by others because they are not who they portray to be. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country people” the author vividly describes a character that has a false sense of reality through intelligence, deception and unbelief. Hugla, the protagonist has a false misinterpretation of her intelligence.

Read More

The Life You Save May Be Your Own Literary Analysis

1297 Words | 6 Pages

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not," said Flannery O 'Conner, who is the author of " The Life You Save May be Your Own" (BrainyQuote). Flannery O 'Connor was a Roman Catholic and she often reflect her faith in her writings. She is one of the most famous American Literature writer who writes in the style of Southern Gothic (Holt 940). And this short stories of hers has gothic humor in it because it contains both horror and romance. In "The Life You Save May be Your Own", O 'Connor used symbolism and imagery to bring out her theme, which is moral corruption and the search of the meaning of life.

Read More

Distortion In Good Country People

473 Words | 2 Pages

Manley is not a simple christian boy. He is a scam artist who just tricked a woman with a P.H.D in Philosophy out of her wooden leg. O’Connor wants us, from the beginning, to assume he is a pleasant young man with good intentions of love. This plays into the distortion aspect because Manley is presented to us in such a kind manner but his personality and attributes are distorted from a realistic

Read More

Distortion In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

1466 Words | 6 Pages

O’Connor’s use of satire and how morbid the characters give the reader to not sympathize with them because of their pettiness, ludicrous, and so irredeemably gauche character. “O’Connor creates hearty guffaws and cries of horror, then

Read More

Good Man Is Hard To Find Response

1016 Words | 5 Pages

In her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor introduces the reader to a world of family issues, danger, and murder. The story was written in 1955 during a period of social and racial unrest in the southern United States. Mostly, the story follows O 'Connor 's basic Southern Gothic writing style. A work that is "cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent" (Galloway). While the quote gives major insight into the theme of the story, it does not offer a glimpse into O 'Connor 's real message of the story.

Read More

Grotesque In Flannery O Connor's Beauty And The Beast

1873 Words | 8 Pages

Beauty and the Beast is a well known Disney story everyone knows. The story follows a man who was once beautiful, but his arrogance led to him being turned into this terrifying monster known as the Beast. The Beast is a well known grotesque character because he symbolizes what arrogance will do to a man[or woman]. The definition of grotesque is “Odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre”(Dictionary.com). Flannery O’Connor is a well known writer who writes in a Southern Gothic writing style to convey a grotesque image in her characters and settings because she believes that its the only way to get people to see the way she sees as she’s stated in her quote, “I am interested in making a good case

Read More

Violence In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

1393 Words | 6 Pages

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a story where the roles of good and evil blend together. In the short story, a family in the rural South gets caught up with a criminal named the Misfit after their wreck and they end up getting murdered. The clash between the grandmother and the Misfit highlights the religious aspects of the story and also O’Connor’s beliefs. Her stylistic traits of violence, distortion, and religion are used to convey a corrupt world that needs salvation. O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation.

Read More

Feminism In Gothic Literature

748 Words | 3 Pages

Yet, Radcliffe’s precocity to feminise the genre is not limited to her treatment and coverage of women’s sufferings and fears. Susan Becker further explained that her “earl[iest] twists in the feminisation of the Gothic, namely [is] in the reduction of the villain, otherwise subject of the action, to a mere function in the female subject’s transcendence of ‘her proper sphere’: the home” (“Postmodern Feminine Horror” 79-80). Striving to liberate them, Radcliffe’s narratives took the shape of suspenseful mysterious narrative of Romantic journey in which the ‘travelling’ heroine-centered narrative “who moves, who acts, who copes with vicissitude,” escaped, even temporarily, from the patriarchal confining house (qtd. in Hanson 37).

Read More

Symbolism In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

1254 Words | 6 Pages

In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she uses writing skills such as symbolism and imagery to get across her different themes to the reader’s with plenty of room for self-interpretation. Though O’Connor’s work could be defined as cynical, she does an excellent job of writing in the third person with her uncomplicated structure of sentences leaving plenty of room for her character 's thoughts, feelings, and actions to get across the realism of our world. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a battle between a grandmother with a rather artificial sense of goodness, and a criminal who symbolizes evil. The grandmother treats goodness as having good manners, and coming from a family of higher class, but at the end of the story comes to

Read More

Furnished Room Analysis

2326 Words | 10 Pages

In the post-war period, the art of the short story flourished in American literature. Among its most respected practitioners was Flannery o’ connor who renewed the fascination of such giants as Faulkner and Twain with the American south, developing a distinctive southern gothic esthetic wherein characters acted at one level as people and at another symbols. Most of the authors interested to give many moralistic short stories in American literature. In this session we have to discuss about two short stories based as the theme of isolation. That the novels are The Furnished Room by o’ Hendry and The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe.

Read More

More about Examples Of Flannery O Connor Grotesque

Related Topics

Open Document