Black Humor In O’ Conner’s Short Story

Flannery O’Conner (1925-1964) is recognized as one of the most outstanding American southern female writers after Faulkner in the Twentieth Century. In her short39years, she creates two novels and thirty-two short stories, and her short stories are considered the greatest works in American literature. The style of her works is mostly grotesque, permeated with a rich southern flavor and a strong religious consciousness as well, and she has a keen insight into the darkness and evil of human nature. Because her works are rooted in the profound American southern religious culture, more and more scholars at home and abroad have focused their attention on the themes of original sin and religious Epiphany, violence and death, God’s Grace and salvation or writing techniques like symbolism.On the basis of previous literary criticism, this thesis attempts to break through the traditional viewpoints of study on O’Conner’s works, and analyzes her style and features of her short stories from the perspective of "black humor". Although scholars believes that the genre of "black humor" forms in the1960s and flourished in the1970s, whether in theme, style, plot or character, most of O’Conner’s short stories are filled with the literary skill of black humor. Generally, there are many funny characters and comic plots, while the readers’ soul is greatly shocked by the unexpected violence or death at the end of these stories. Just as O’Conner says,"To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw a large and startling figures"(Fitzgerald33). In order to awaken people’s religious consciousness, Flannery O’Conner, as a devout Catholic writer, describes violence and death as an outlier, and exposes the absurdity and distortion of the society and the degeneration of humankind, so as to wake up and save people through violence and redemption. In order to show the themes fully, O’Conner takes the black humor as an effective tool. If there were no black humor in her short stories, the effect of shock brought by a striking contrast between comedies and tragedies would be greatly weakened. Thus, not only O’Conner’s purpose of awakening and saving the people would have failed, but also her novels would have become pale and lost its enduring artistic charm.The paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter mainly introduces O’Conner’s major works at home and abroad and the situation of studies on her works; discusses "black humor" from its origins, definitions and main writing characteristics. The second chapter mainly analyzes the "black humor" in O’Conner’s short stories from the aspects of theme, plot, character and language. The third chapter mainly discusses the distinctive individual features of O’Conner’s "black humor". Because of her life background in the American South, O’Conner’s "black humor" often involves religion and God. The life experience in southern farm also makes her stories focus on the relaxation and tension of the relationship between southern blacks and whites; as a female writer, O’Conner’s works tend to focus on women’s existence and lives in American society. A group of female characters are the leading roles in the stories, and most of them are depicted with a sense of black humor by O’Conner, however, they usually suffer tragic fates ultimately, which reflects women’s living conditions in the American South. The fourth chapter discusses the reasons for the formation of O’Conner’s distinctive black humor from three aspects-the religious factors, the social factors and the personal factors. The conclusion of this paper points out that black humor is one of the most important features of O’Conner’s short stories, and the ingenious application of black humor in O’Conner’s short stories not only helps to deepen the themes, but also makes her works exude an enduring charm in the literature of the world.By interpreting O’Conner’s short stories from the perspective of "black humor" in this thesis, the researches on O’Conner and her works could hopefully be enriched, and it may contribute another understanding of Flannery O’Conner and her short stories to O’Conner’study.