Comic Elements In O'Connor's Stories

Flannery O'Connor, a Southern woman writer comparable with William Faulkner, occupies a prominent position in the history of post-war literature for her outstanding stories. Greatly concerned with human spirit, O'Connor's works have drawn constant scholarly attention even after her death.Early reviewers paid much attention to the scenes of violence and images of grotesqueness presented in O'Connor's works, often neglecting her comic elements. O'Connor insisted that her writings be comic, for in her mind, all comic novels that are"any good"must be about life and death. Later critics study her claimed comedies from different perspectives and define her comic forms in a convincing way.Based on the achievements of the critics on O'Connor's comic stories, this thesis studies her comedy in a comprehensive way. Great efforts have been made in the research of the plot of her comedy before a V-shaped structure is detected. More interesting things appear after further explorations, the V-shape consists of a fall and a rise, where O'Connor intelligently employs distinct styles of comedy to demonstrate her ideas: in the fall part, an ironical comedy appears and in the rise part theological comedy. By the two different comedies, O'Connor unveils her religious idea of"grace", a theme recurrent in her works.Comic sinners have been found to be the objects of satire in O'Connor's stories. In exposing and satirizing the ugliness of the characters, O'Connor adopts the devices of inversion and inflation-deflation to reveal the sins among people.The thesis consists of five chapters. Besides an introduction (Chapter one) and a conclusion (Chapter five), the thesis explores the structure of O'Connor's stories and discusses the tension of her comic stories in chapter two to find the recurrent theme. And chapter three analyses the images of sinners in her comedy and critically construes her devices in presenting her comic stories; Chapter four focuses on the presentation of the theological comedy in O'Connor's works, intending to disclose the relationship between her Christian views and comedy. The conclusion is thus reached that a theological perspective is often needed to understand her comic elements in O'Connor's stories.Over the controversial issue about O'Connor's works, the thesis offers a new perspective to the study of O'Connor's stories, which need in-depth comprehension of religion before a better understanding of her comedy.