In her novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor employs the use of many themes, motifs, and symbols in order to weave structure into the often confusing and seemingly distorted story. One of the most prominent themes illustrated throughout this book...

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is a powerfully unsettling novel concerning a lost man in the grotesque, dark world of the American South. Published in 1949, Wise Blood’s protagonist Hazel Motes serves as a reflection of the power of mythology that...

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood addresses the laws and ethics of 20th Century America. Laws and ethics may seem to correlate, but Wise Blood shows that such is not always the case. Laws may claim to have ethical origins and serve ethical purposes,...

In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva brings up a subject of abjection and states that it is “positioned somewhere between the I, the subject, and the object” (Graulund). To put it in Kristeva’s own words, the abject functions in the “in-between, the...

The working class often describes those who work blue-collar jobs with low wages. Those who belong to the working class often face job insecurity because they do not have the same rights and safeguards for their jobs, unlike their employers, who...

When does redemption cross the lines between righteousness and damnation? When does the end truly justify the means? Sometimes, it can be hard to discern when it is acceptable to right a wrong with another wrong. However, in the cases of the...

A detailed description allows people to imagine even though not visible. Authors like Flannery O' Connor, in their works, have put in huge details in order to awaken the senses of the readers and help imagine the minutest of details. This aids...

Flannery O'Connor's short stories are notoriously filled with religious subtext and symbolism. In her final collection of stories, published after her death in 1964, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, much debate among critics and scholars...

Flannery O’Connor explores ‘generations’ and the hierarchies between them through her short stories, “The Artificial N*gger,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “Why Do The Heathen Rage?”. To that purpose, she uses the narrator as a giver...

"And they lived happily ever after." This picturesque phrase can hardly be described as a typical ending to a Flannery O'Connor work. In a 'standard' O'Connor piece, one can expect to find several allusions to religion, sardonic situations, and...

In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," a lively family embarks on a trip fueled by foreboding images. Masterfully, O'Connor displays a crisp slice of Southern life. However, this picture of 1950s pastoral America is tainted with...

In "Everything that Rises must Converge" Flannery O' Connor compares the robustness of different methods of maintaining identity. The two identity schemas being compared are those of Julian, the highly individualistic, cerebral main character and...

Flannery O'Connor's Intellectuals: Exposing Her World's Narrow "Field of Vision"

by, Robin K. Brubaker

June 24, 2004

Some critics would argue that a fiction writer's Christianity, or understanding of ultimate reality in terms of the Fall of...

In the short story "The Lame Shall Enter First," author Flannery O'Connor describes a widower's attempts to mask his grief over his wife's death. In order to fill the void in his heart, the widower, Sheppard, throws himself into miscellaneous...

Horrific, extraordinary, macabre, or supernatural events and “an atmosphere of mystery and suspense” are the essentials of the American Gothic genre of literature (Phillips). The Southern Gothic sub-genre sets the events in the American South,...

In Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner creates a spiritually empty world in which her characters attempt to live life without morals or religion. Hazel Motes, the protagonist, creates the Church without Christ to escape organized religion all together....

The idea of the grotesque is presented in both Naguib Mahfouz’s novel <i>Midaq Alley</i> and Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People.” Although the settings, plots, and characters differ, both works present an underlying...

Dehumanization of the protagonist is a common thematic element in both Kafka’s <i>The Metamorphosis</i> and O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter of the Enemy,” although the various aspects of dehumanization differ between the two works....

The destruction of tradition in the name of progress exists in Flannery O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods” and Ivan Turgenev’s <i>Fathers and Sons</i> through the main protagonists in each work. Bazarov is the central character of...

The Christian religion plays a key role in both Flannery O’Connor’s <i>Wise Blood</i> and Richard Wright’s <i>Black Boy</i>. Despite the authors’ ideological differences, both Wright’s childhood self and O’Connor’s...

Both Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O’Conner’s Revelation and the narrator in Raymond Craver’s Cathedral hold prejudiced worldviews. However, Mrs. Turpin is religious and expresses her self-satisfied thoughts openly, while the narrator dismisses others...

One of the most prominent and important features of Southern Gothic literature is its incorporation of a character that is a “freak” into the narrative, with this freak being someone who stands out due to a disability that is external, internal,...

Existentialism proposed the idea that one is a “free agent” in determining their own development through acts of one’s own free will and self-judgement. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” existentialist principles are embodied by...

Who doesn’t want to be a good human being? Being good could bring one to happiness, joy, faith, and grace. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor, however, reveals a satiric reality in which not many people fully understand the...