An Analysis Of Flannery O'Connor's Salvation Thoughts

Flannery O'Connor is a unique American Southern writer.She was born into a staunch Catholic family in the "Bible Belt".O'Connor depicts a series of shocking images of Christian fundamentalism in her works,full of religious symbols and biblical metaphors.Her letter collection The Habit of Being records her spiritual initiation while the novel The Violent Bear It Away and short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," two representative works,explore themes such as religious thirst,the struggle of the soul,and the conflict between rationality and faith,which are illuminating and thought-provoking.Through an overview of O'Connor's letters and her essays,this thesis gives a textual analysis of her two works,introducing the origin of her religious belief,expounding major characters' confusion and struggles,demonstrating the social reality of religious crisis in American South,and exploring ways to salvation.This thesis consists of five parts.Chapter one is an introduction.It reviews Flannery O'Connor's life experiences and the Southern literary tradition,followed by a literature review of her works.Chapter two analyses O'Connor's thoughts regarding salvation in her letters and her essays.It is religion that provides O'Connor a more clear view of reality.Owing to people's hypocrisy,ignorance,selfishness and degradation in the post-Civil-War South,God's grace can only befall in the form of violence in her fiction.Chapters three and four provide textual analysis of The Violent Bear It Away and "A Good Man Is Hard to Find".Chapter three analyzes four main characters in The Violent Bear It Away:Tarwater,the great-uncle,the school teacher Rayber and dim-witted boy Bishop.Chapter four interprets the grandmother,her son Bailey and the Misfit in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find",exploring her anxiety for religious crisis and thoughts of violent redemption.Chapter five is the conclusion.For O'Connor,the extreme violence in her writing is only a means to help people realize their sin,and the final solution is to follow God.Those who abandon God will finally be abandoned by God.By this interpretation can the author present a deeper understanding of these two works and have a more accurate grasp of these themes in O'Connor's works.