Sin And Salvation

Flannery O’Connor is famous for her short stories, and she have a great influence in the world. O’Connor wrote many short stories, but only two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Her works are endowed with a rich and mysterious religious implication since she was born in a Catholic family and grew up in what was referred to as the "Bible Belt" of the south. She alluded to the plight of modern Americans who were mentally drained and could not help themselves in real life by shaping the murderers, Christian, female farmers, tramps, the disabled and a series of impressive image of sinners, as well as the rendering of the death scenes, violence and other factors in the strong flexible stories. She revealed the evils of the real world and urged people to find the truth they had never found, and then lead them to the road of redemption with the tone and attitude of a bystander. Therefore, this paper attempts to take sin and redemption as a starting point to explore the deep religious connotation of O’Connor’s fiction, revealing the realistic significance behind the text.This paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter has carried on the analysis to all kinds of sin and sinners image in O’Conner’s fiction, discusses the indifference of the family relationship deeply under the disintegration of the traditional value of the south, the conflicts between the new and old under the background of social transformation, and the blind pursuit of rationality, abandonment and the use of faith when people were in the spirit of the desert.The second chapter mainly discusses the religious redemption meaning behind the violence and death from the details of her works. No matter the destruction of the objects and the depiction of the illusion of scene behind the violence, or the soul redemption functions of death to self and others suggest the possibility that people may be re-converted to faith after experiencing violence and death. Meanwhile, the struggling on faith of the "Satan"-style figures who were perpetrators also pinned O’Connor’s thinking and concern for the human destiny.The third chapter mainly explores the reasons of sin and salvation in O’Connor’s fiction from two aspects of her religious view and the social background. O’Connor’s works always start with faith, and finish with faith as well, revealing the crisis of religious belief in the modern society, expressing her reflection and hope to the plight of the human spirit as a Christian writer through the perspective of modern humanity. The sinners and the crimes, the salvation behind the violence and death in O’Connor’s fiction reflect strong religious atmosphere. However, she never takes her fictions as propaganda of religious doctrine. O’Connor projects her own understanding of religion onto the spiritual paralysis of society, and then become it into a kind of essence, which requires the reader to savor and thinking. All of this suggests an eternal that based on reality and beyond reality with her superb writing skills.