Out Of Nihilism--Research On Flannery O'Connor's Nihilism

Flannery O'Connor is considered as one of the outstanding writers of the American South in 20th century. Her work is full of grotesque style, religious color and profound meaning, which reveals the spiritual wasteland scene of the post-war American South. O'Connor thinks that nihilism is the source of people's spiritual crisis. Therefore, she intentionally creates a series of grotesque characters to expose people's alienated psychology in the shadow of nihilism and shows her refusal and critical attitude towards nihilism by using violence and death as the end of the novel.As far as O'Connor's research hotspot, most research topics focus on the religious theme and the gothic grotesquery in O'Connor's work. So Flannery O'Connor is called a gothic writer or religious writer and considered that the reason why she chooses grotesquery as her most important writing style is to show her religious view. This thesis, uniquely striking out from another angle of discussing the idea of nihilism in her fictions, analyses her attack against nihilism, revealing how she uses grotesquery to criticize nihilism, indicating that she is not a mere gothic writer or religious writer. Another innovative point of this thesis is giving a new practical significance to the research on O'Connor's nihilism. In my opinion, there is an enlightening significance of the research on O'Connor for Black Humor. Both O'Connor and writers of Black Humor use grotesquery as the writing style to indicate their critical attitude to nihilism.This thesis includes Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Conclusion.The Introduction introduces the academic background and the significance, means and ideas of the research.Chapter One expounds the main idea of nihilism and grotesquery. Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless, which can destroy all the moral and religious beliefs, causing moral crisis and mental crisis. Grotesquery has always been a major feature of American Southern literature. It's easy to find the effect of nihilism on American post-war literature and American Southern literature. As a member of American post-war Southern writers, O'Connor also cannot get rid of nothingness, which can be found in her fictions. In a particular age and social background, her firm religious belief offers her unique position to the phenomenon of nihilism. She criticizes it with astringent style of writing. By showing us the terrible consequence of nothingness, her fictions function as a warning.Chapter Two concentrates on the concrete textual analyses of O'Connor's fictions, indicating that grotesquery is characters' outward manifestation and nothingness is their inner thought. The way that O'Connor uses grotesquery to reveal nothingness is the major topic of this chapter. In this chapter, we divide the grotesque characters into healthy persons and disabled persons. By analyzing these characters' ugly and gruesome behaviour, we can see their nothingness. At the end of this chapter, we give a careful investigation on the reason of nihilism, which is the unbearable suffering and pain of people.Chapter Three focuses on the way that O'Connor shows us how to get rid of nihilism, which is changing one's belief from nihilism to Catholic. The meaning of original sin is introduced, which can be divided into sin of pride, sin of egoism and sin of rationalism. All the above sins can be found on the grotesque characters in O'Connor's fictions. Violence is considered to be the peculiar way to get salvation in Catholicism. O'Connor explains this opinion by creating terrible and grotesque ending for the characters. We combine O'Connor's views of original sin, violent salvation with her criticism on nihilism by analyzing O'Connor's novel, Wise Blood.Chapter Four is the research on O'Connor's nihilism and the postmodern, discussing the link between O'Connor's nihilism and Black Humor, pointing out the practical significance of this research.The Conclusion shows the innovation points and the deficiencies in this research.