Enlightening Effect Of The Grotesque In O'Connor's Works

During her lifetime (1925-1964), Flannery O'Connor came up with 2 novels and 31 short stories. All her literary works are widely known for their inclination toward the grotesque, which refers to the distortion of characters and frequent outbreak of violence. Because of the extremity of character distortion and ugliness brought on by violence, Flannery O'Connor has become a commonly held target for vitriolic criticism. However, a close examination of O'Connor's works and her grotesque approach to literary creation makes it pretty clear that the grotesque elements attacked by aforesaid critics are actually employed by O'Connor as means to achieve an end, i.e. to educate and enlighten people, first characters in the stories and then readers.If so, how do those grotesque devices manage under the author's pen to land such a powerful impact on readers'inner world so that they are jolted into a new perspective of self-evaluation and therefore elevated to a new height of self-awareness? This is the very question the current research project sets out to answer in a somewhat thoughtful and systematic way, as it has been the primary concern of the author of this thesis for quite some time.This thesis consists of five subsections. Section One is introduction, which defines the term"grotesque"and thus elucidates the central proposition of the thesis, that is, grotesque is a narrative device employed by an author to educate and enlighten readers by way of hyperbole and the subsequent shock it throws off. The second section is an analysis of the distorted characters in O'Connor's works so as to put across the idea that deformity effectively gives people acute consciousness of human weaknesses. Of course, deformity here refers not only to exterior defects, but to internal maladies as well. Section Three is an effort to show the catalytic role violence plays in bringing about a new birth, based on an interpretation of O'Connor's representative works and citation of critics'as well as the author's comments on the effect of violence. The next section is an elaborate study of O'Connor's two grotesque-rendering narrative devices, which the author of this thesis holds to be most typical, namely humor and supernatural setting evoked by allusion. The study demonstrates that the thought-provoking humor arises not so much out of the deformity of characters or unexpectedness of catastrophe as out of the shock readers receive from the momentary clash between the disastrous incident and the otherwise anticipated plot development. As for the use of allusion to usher in the supernatural scene, the purpose is to emphasize the existence of mysterious forces and God. All those doubtless contribute to the education of readers. On ground of the above analysis, Section Five comes to the conclusion that every element of the grotesque is incorporated into the works with a heuristic and enlightening purpose rather than introduced for the mere sake of insinuating horror and/or poking fun.