Tragic Aesthetics In Flannery O’connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Flannery O’Connor(1925—1964) is a great American writer. She tried to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life through her unique writing skills. Her works--novels, short stories, letters and criticism--had received a number of awards, including the National Book Award.As her most famous work, A Good Man is Hard to Find has indicated the dark sides in the world, such as death, cruelty and guilt. This book consists of 10 classic short stories and could be analyzed from the perspective of tragic aesthetics. In tragic aesthetics, good things suffer from the destruction and misfortunes inevitably and finally cause a feeling of sorrow, fear and pity, which will recall readers’ anger and compassion and makes them re-think about their attitudes toward life.This thesis analyzes the basic features of tragic aesthetics in A Good Man is Hard to Find from four aspects--freaky images, typical endings and settings, third-person narration perspective and themes. Firstly, from the aspect of images, it indicates a tragic conflict between characters and reality and the image plays an important role in supporting plots. Secondly, the horrible and ironic ending is another typical feature of tragic aesthetics and belongs to the analysis on plot. It colors the story with horror, anger and black humor to make readers deeply think about life. Secondly, the symbolic setting has a close relationship with the plot to support each other and has a function of strengthening the themes. Then, from the perspective of third-person narration, it makes stories become more objective. In addition, the themes like death and cruelty are mainly related to the dark sides in the world. Other themes like Epiphany and conflicts in the south of America, have an alarming function to make readers rethink. Therefore, tragic aesthetics in O’Connor’s work could be analyzed from these four aspects in detail to expose the causes of its tragic effects.