The Violence and Despair of Flannery O'Connor

From reading only two of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories-“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Revelation”-the recurring theme of violence and despair in her writing became evident. It is intriguing as a reader to study O’Connor’s background in order to get insight into her dark writing. Her family suffered from the hereditary disease, lupus, which took the life of her father when she was only 15. Not long after his death, O’Connor herself was diagnosed with the disease. It was recorded that she rarely spoke of her father’s death or of her own sufferings. O’Connor lived until her mid thirties aware of her own impending death, making life an everyday struggle.

O’Connor’s struggle comes out in many of her characters. Of those I met in the two stories, all of them were irritable and unpleasant. O’Connor may have been treated differently because of her disease, and therefore the negative people that she encountered became her characters. Another theory may be that she makes her characters unpleasant and uses a dark and dreadful theme in order to help her understand or explain disease and human suffering. Either way, the characters in O’Connor’s stories help to develop a consistently dark theme in her writing.

The themes of both “Revelation” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” concentrate on human misery and lost souls. On the Cyber Pat blog by Patrick Galloway, The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction, O’Connor is recorded as saying, “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” In both stories, at least one character seems to be going through a great amount of emotional turmoil, and each individual deals with it in their own way. In “Revelation”, Mary Grace lets out her hatred towards the judgmental Mrs. Turpin in a violent way (as O’Connor previously stated), by throwing a book at her head (102). Mrs. Turpin, on the other hand, looked towards God to guide her soul and lead her towards heaven (79). In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the Misfit also uses violence, this time in the form of murder, to let out his emotion (124). I find that although the violence these characters use is meant to help them accept their moment of grace, it is unsuccessful and I do not believe the characters go through any spiritual change in the end, as O’Connor may have anticipated.

The Misfit is a particularly interesting character in that it seems as though O’Connor is trying to make the reader respect him, or at least pity him. Despite the fact that his crimes are so cruel, he has an explanation for why he does them. He explains that he was put into the penitentiary for a crime that he didn’t do (112). After he was put into jail, he explains that from then on he strove to make what he had done wrong fit his punishment, but that it never worked (130). I find it ironic that a place that is meant to punish criminals and to hopefully change them, can do the exact opposite. In this case, jail created a murdered from someone who, although charged as a murderer, had not previously been one.

One of the things I found most interesting about both of the O’Connor stories is that they had a sudden plot change that caught the readers’ attention. Usually in stories, the foreshadowing to the climax is gradual and steady, but in O’Connor’s stories, she comes out of left field with a sudden plot change. It is completely unexpected, and in my case, makes the reader have to stop and re-read what just happened. For example, in “Revelation”, Mrs. Turpin is in the waiting room talking to Mary Grace’s mother about how happy she is that she got Claude and no one else did, and all of a sudden, “The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it.” (102). In the paragraphs previous to that, there was no mention of Mary Grace holding the book or of her being increasingly annoyed with Mrs. Turpin, which leaves the reader shocked at her actions. I personally did not enjoy this aspect of the novel, but along with her dark underlying themes of despair and her violent characters, it is another thing that makes Flannery O’Connor stick out from other short story writers. (761)