The stories of Flannery O'Connor
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The stories of Flannery O'Connor are set in her contemporary South and depict intense and even bizarre human emotions set against a world that gives the illusion of having progressed beyond animal instincts. O'Connor shows a concern with the tension between body and mind, the physical and the spiritual. She presents this tension in the context of an almost allegorical structure in her stories. These stories take place in a world that is cruel, where human beings inflict damage on one another almost as a matter of course. The world O'Connor creates in her stories is one where the conflict between mind and body is often bloody and may border on the grotesque, and in her stories the plot and theme unfolds in a world with mythological power and significance. The theme of abandonment is often present in these stories and reinforces the idea that the mind actually separates us from the world around us so that no matter what connections we might make with the world around us, ultimately we are alone. There is also a tension between the modern world and the primitive, the world of the machine and the world of human emotions. For O'Connor, the machine qualities of the modern world are antithetical to human nature and impose an order that is unnatural--sometimes to be preferred, but unnatural just the same. The contrast between the human and the machine is portrayed in a violent setting that serves as a constant background to the stories told and that give shape to the themes e
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amily has an accident when the old woman's cat jumps on her son, Bailey, causing him to veer off the road. The evil they encounter comes from another vehicle, a car driven by three escaped convicts. News of the convicts has been brought to the family prior to this by way of another machine--the car radio. The family extricates itself from one wreck only to run right into something much worse.
The title of the story is ironic. The old woman faces death at the hands of the Misfit, the leader of the gang, as he has each member of the family taken off into the woods and shot. He does so mechanically, having become a machine himself, and he has done so, as he himself indicates in different ways, because of his conviction religion has thrown the mechanics of the world off balance. He has no humanity left. When the old woman keeps saying that she can see that he is a good man, and that a good man is hard to find, the irony is that he is neither good nor a man any longer. More than this, there is a sense that it is just as hard to find an evil man, and yet here the old woman stands face to face with one. The mass of humanity is neither good nor bad, and much of it is as spiritually lacking as this family and perhaps just as ine
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Approximate Word count = 3479
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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