Grotesque Figures In Flannery O’connor’s Short Stories

Flannery O’Connor, recognized as a renowned writer after William Faulkner in American southern literature, came up with two novels and altogether31short stories. Enlightened by Christianity, with the insight into the reality of post-war American South, Flannery O’Connor, through the bizarre figures deformed in body and spirit, the unexpected violence and death, and the exaggerated plot together with the typical gloomy southern settings, attempts both to expose the overwhelmingly pervasive human degeneracy and to wake up the actually numb countrymen who are oblivious to the ever-changing reality.Absurd figures with incomplete personality, melodramatic plotting, and unexpected ending of violence and death in particular make up one of her distinctwriting styles grotesqueness, which is under great controversies. Is she in real life amisanthropist, cruel and callous as others view? Does she deliberately intend to applythe chilly irony and humor to satisfy readers?This thesis attempts to eliminate people’s bias towards Flannery O’Connor sothat a better understanding about her as one who was born and raised in the southernpart of America after the depression in the Great War will be achieved. What’s more,this thesis will probe into the observed reality and its tradition that has enrichedFlannery O’Connor’s own outlook.Three groups of grotesque figures are to be explored in this thesis with closereference to her several representative short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find,Good Country People, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and The DisplacedPerson and etc. The bullied widows, whose fates reveal a difficult female existence,are either isolated by their own supposed superiority or challenged by a deviant child,only to receive the defeat and embrace the collapsed reality at last. The second groupis recalcitrant children lost in self-deception and pride including self-conceitedgrown-up intellectuals and the premature ones with a startling insight. The last is thedark intruders who disturb the formerly stable atmosphere, bringing disaster to thewhole society.There are unavoidably paralyzed Dubliners in James Joyce’s works, so are lonelysouls crying inwardly in disguise in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Unlikethose, O’Connor’s grotesque characters are born out of complex forces. Incorporatedinto the thesis are the various forces which contribute to the formation of the abovecharacters, such as religious beliefs, observed realities of the post-war society,personal suffering and influences from literary predecessors.The textual analysis will be adopted to probe into the subtlety of three types ofgrotesque figures. Besides, social-historical method will also be employed to examinethe social background. This thesis intends to give a full picture of the grotesquefigures in a spiritually-degenerated land with violence and death, and strives toenunciate the various forces forming such figures, affording a new dimension as wellas a new analytical perspective to the interpretation of grotesque characters in theAmerican Southern society.