The Function of the Grotesque in Flannery Oconners writing

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The Function of Grotesque in Flannery O ' Connors Selected Stories

Flannery O ' Connor : Background and Influences

Flannery O ' Connor 's writing is known to have catholic themes . She has always put a conscious effort in playing a dual role of a devout Catholic and a fiction writer . This is for the main reason that she grew up as a Catholic and as a migrant catholic in the United States . When her family arrived in Georgia , Catholics were being discriminated the way blacks are . There have

been regulations against their presence and they saw it as an opportunity to draw attention to their religious beliefs and practices and to make a name and reputation for themselves as mischievous among others . In line with this , she was always aware of the weakness of preaching and she is always a supporter of letting literature work as art that evokes feelings rather than action According to her , when the finished work suggests pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered , whatever purposes the writer startled out with have already been defeated

Her career as a writer started to sprout along with her first novel entitled the Wise Blood which predicated what to be known as her style of writing as having a disturbing and puzzling effect to her readers while maintaining the theme of Christian Orthodoxy in her writings . Time reviewed her stories as witheringly sarcastic ' for she uses brutal irony , a slambang humor and a style of wrting as balefully direct as a death sentence . The New Yorker , on one hand , says that

There is brutality in tehse stories , but since the brutes are as mindless as their victims , all we have , in the end , is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown , or survive to float passively in the isolated sea of the author 's compassion , which accepts them without reflecting (Whitt 2

Contemporary reviewers agreed that more than the grotesque characteristics of her works are the theme of Southern and Catholic life . Her work is recognized by both early and contemporary critics as violent , grotesque , and horribly funny , with a twist . On the first account of her short stories , readers would surely find it disturbing because of the use of violence that is palpable in a superficial sense She described her characters as having an inner coherence , if not always a coherence to their social framework . Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns , toward mystery , and the unexpected ' Moreover , she portrays her characters as distinctly Southern that have their own way of living and doing things as well as mysterious in a religious sense . The violence , distortions , and grotesque orientation that she incorporates in her stories are meant to alert the reader to turn to Christian faith for salvation . Her characters do not take Catholicism moderately but their faith and theological visions are in an all-or-nothing perspective . Her use of violence was her means of returning her characters to reality...