The theme of abandonment is often present in Flannery O'Connor's stories and reinforces the idea that the mind actually separates people from the world around them so that no matter what connections people might make with the world around them, ultimately they 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 gives shape to the themes expressed, as will be seen in several of her stories. These elements can be seen in the character of the Misfit in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and help to explain his actions and link them to the larger society.
O'Connor's stories 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. She said of the South that the writer had to wrestle with it and its meanings to extract a "blessing" from it (Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald 198). 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.
O'Connor derives her view of the world from her Southern roots, and her South is a place ...