Two Stories by 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, with the power and prevalence of the machine as a metaphor for that sense of progress. For O'Connor, though, 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 world portrayed by O'Connor is a mythic world in which the author measures the conflict between the physical and the spiritual, the real and the imagined, life and art. The machine is both a physical entity and a mythic essence, the idea of the machine rather than the machine itself. Many of O'Connor's characters are themselves described as being machine-like in some way. They are influenced by the times in which they live but they are not freedom from drudgery so much as they are freed from conscience by the machine. This can be illustrated by considering the characters in two stories, "A Good man Is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and their relationship to machines.Machine imagery is mixed with religious imagery in these stories, and the meaning of the machine for O'Connor must be seen in terms of her view of the importance of the spiritual and of the degree to which the human being sees the spiritual as a threat. This is the opposite of what would usually be
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s a trap. The family 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 perh
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1660
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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