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Literary Analysis: Flannery O Connor

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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 …show more content…

We are all flawed from O’Connor’s view. The essence of humanity is sin, everyone is a sinner. Apart from that, the moments of grace that O’Connor was referring to was the moment when her characters are stirred. According to Bible, “Until we see ourselves as sinners, we won’t recognize Christ as Savior” (Luke 5:31), I think this message is what O’Connor wanted to deliver through her stories; the moments of grace are when the characters realize they need grace, meaning that when the characters discern that they are also wrongdoer like the others who need to be forgiven. All should concede that they are smutty, rotten heathens who require grace before they can accept grace. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that moment of grace arrives when the prominent criminal points his gun at the grandmother. In spite of the fact that in the story she has spent most of the time picking at people while luxuriating in her own particular goodness, she has an epiphany. She takes a gander at the Misfit and thought of her child, realizing that two of them are not so unalike. She is silent and her hat that she is so fond …show more content…

In the story, the grandmother is promptly filled with practically otherworldly love and comprehension that are from God. She treats The Misfit as a kindred enduring person whom she is committed to love because of that moment of grace that God gives her at a sudden. (Every individual should have compassion to others and love his kindred people like himself, even his foes. As Jesus instructs all of us to.) The grandmother understands that love is for everyone even The Misfit, that she loves The Misfit simply as if he is her child. The view of him as a kindred individual, and the sudden yet genuine sentiment cherish for him are both unveiled, as endowments of God. The grandmother is an individual is slanted to malice, triviality, and narrow-mindedness, so would not have come to feel such love ever if it is not the assistance from God, from the Catholic

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Flannery O’Connor uses the literary device of the epiphany in many of her short stories. The epiphany, typically used at the conclusion of the short story, highlights the redemptive possibilities for characters that have become engulfed by the increasing secular world. That being said, the chance for redemption is not a smooth and carefree process. Several of O’Connor’s short stories contain a protagonist that experiences an epiphany that transforms them, only then to suffer from some act of violence that solidifies their move towards Christianity. In Good Country People and Revelation, the development of the protagonists and their eventual epiphanies reveal the fullest implications of the stories’ themes.

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Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People, written in southern gothic style is both dramatic and shocking. The complexity of a simple life is nuanced with themes of betrayal and nihilism. O’Connor’s use of symbolism is liberally evidenced throughout the story, with the character’s names seemingly a misappropriation; Mrs. Freeman, is not free, nor does Mrs. Hopewell, hope well. Indeed, it appears the entire short story is based on misnomers; with each of the characters proving that they are not good country people.

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He has confusion about religion. Whereas the grandmother accepts faith wholeheartedly and without any doubt, the Misfit experiments religious beliefs and decides on how he should follow them or not. He has chosen to live by the notion that religion is meaningless and remains to his own kind of religion when he says, ‘”Jesus [is] the only One that ever [raises] the dead… If He

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The story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has many themes. One of the core themes is that selfishness leads to disaster. The unnamed grandmother is very self centered and has no regard for anyone, especially her family. She brought her cat after being told not to, which might have saved their lives. If only she had admitted to her mistake of taking the wrong dirt road, the family would not have crossed the path of the Misfit and his crew.

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The Grandmother is the only member of the family still alive at this point. The misfit holds the grandmother at gunpoint. The grandmother uses faith as a way to escape death and pleads for the character to spare her life. “Pray!” The grandmother pleads pathetically.

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Upon seeing this image, she comprehends that to be truly Christ like, she is going to have to forgive the Misfit and accept him as God’s child. As Susan Petit stated, “Close consideration shows many important parallels between the grandmother… on the one hand and the Misfit…” (3). At this stage, the Misfit also has a revelation. His message, however, is that by murdering the grandmother, he helped out her find God and therefore comprehends that he does have an objective in the world that he will have to answer to an upper power. Author, Flannery O'Connor was deeply worried about the values and the direction of the youth of her time.

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In the 1953 short story titled “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, readers are given a glimpse of what the end of the story may look like through use of foreshadowing, symbolism, and other literary techniques. Although the story looks to be an innocent story of a family who travels to Florida for vacation at the start of it, readers soon find out that the story has a darker twist to it. This family trip turns violent and this gruesome ending can easily represent the violence taking place in America during the time this story was written by O’Connor and even today. The short story starts off with a family of six- parents, a grandmother, and three children-

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St. Cyril of Jerusalem made the analogy that life is like a road that must be traveled with a dragon on the side, waiting to devour any who stray off the road. Within the analogy, the dragon represents the personal temptations everyone has struggled to overcome in order to reach God, who waits at the end of the road. Although everyone struggles with their own personal temptations, most can be put into one of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, anger, sloth, envy, lust, and gluttony. Flannery O’Connor focused on these in her short stories by creating characters that embodied certain sins. In some of her most known stories, such as “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May be Your Own,’’ and “The Displaced Person,” she focused on pride, greed, and anger, respectively.

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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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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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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.

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God’s Amazing Grace God loves all humankind, even the sinners. His love is so great that He sent His only begotten Son into the world to suffer and be crucified on the cross to saves us all from sin. It is through His amazing grace that sinners are forgiven of their sins and are able to live eternally in the Kingdom of God. These Christian principles are what Flannery O 'Connor uses as the main subject in many of her stories. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Redemption’” and “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor uses the theme of salvation to show how God’s love and forgiveness are available to people in everyday life.

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The grandmother uses Jesus as a scapegoat to show how she is a child of God while the Misfit tells of how he really perceives Jesus and that there is no justification of his actions. In the event of the car accident, the Grandmother was left with a physical crisis that quickly showed as her family was sent off into the woods to be killed one by one. This soon transitioned to a spiritual crisis both between the Grandmother and the Misfit as she uses Jesus's name to try and escape her fate. This spiritual crisis leads the characters to express their personal conception of reality and how they perceive the revelation of the situation that they are in. The Grandmother has a sense that reality should revolve around her and that she should manipulate tools such as religion to benefit her outcome.

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Because the Grandmother's intentions still remain unclear of what she really wanted and meant. As well of her point of views of her religion and approach towards it. (The Moment of Grace).The religion of the grandmother is not very clear. She tends to be unpredictable, she doesn’t explains what she reallys means by certain things she says or the way she expresses herself. The grandmother is the center of the family, for she is the grace.

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The grandmother grew in that moment of death more than she ever did in the little parts that we read about her life, and she dies in peace. Her actions may have even changed the Misfit too. At the end, he says “she would have been a good woman if he 'd been there all her life to shoot her.” (366). This line confused me the first time reading it, but the second time around it made more sense.

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