The theme of abandonment and Flannery O'Connor

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 stori

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woman stands face to face with one. Her inability to keep quiet contributes to the problem, for she tells the Misfit she knows who he is: "'Yes'm,' the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of hismelf to be known, 'but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me'" (O'Connor 127). The accident has turned into an incipient tragedy, and this tragedy takes place almost as an afterthought. The mass of humanity is neither good nor bad, and much of it is as spiritually lacking as this family and perhaps just as inept with the machinery that is supposed to make their lives more worth living and to give them more time to deal with their spiritual natures. In practice, this is not the effect the machine has at all. Like the car and the radio, it only brings bad news that these people are spiritually unequipped to handle. Dorothy Walters states that O'Connor's fiction should be called "Christian tragicomedy": "Her fiction falls into the broad category of tragicomedy . . . However, because O'Connor is so deeply preoccupied by religious concerns, the term Christian tragicomedy serves especially well to characterize her achievement" (Walters 23). The actions of the Misfit and the

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