where the human and the modern clash:
The passions are just beneath the stagnant surface in Flannery O'connor's stories. She was an old Catholic, not a convert, in the South of the poor white of the Bible Belt and this gave her a critical skirmishing power. But the symbolism of religion, rather than the acrimonies of sectarian dispute, fed her violent imagination (Pritchett 1552).
Religion itself is often presented in terms of a form of abandonment, as in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" when the Misfit details how Christ raised the dead and in effect spoiled the natural order of things.
O'Connor shocks the reader with images and actions of violence, suffering, and death, yet these images take place in a structure and a style that is distinctly comic. She uses incongruity as a way of achieving this mixture of opposites. This incongruity is also seen in terms of the way O'Connor intertwines the physical and the spiritual, and the mechanical and the organic. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the automobile carries a spiritually vapid family to a rendezvous with evil. The family is taking a trip to
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