What the Handicapped Reveal Reading Flannery O'Connor's Fiction

In Flannery O'Connor's stories the handicapped often enact controlling roles. They cut contrasting figures with the "normal" who are often blind to the O'Connorean truth. Though O'Connor relentlessly describes the realities of the handicapped, she is not so much interested in dealing with social justices as she is in the ontological problems and topics treated in such theological discourses-theodicy, and soteriology. A detailed examination of the texts of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People" is to show Flannery O'Connor's prophetic messages couched in her stories. O'Connor saw a horrible void beneath the surface of the seemingly Christian society of the South-the setting of her fiction. In her work she poignantly ridicules the credulity of the "normal" who do not realize that theirs are the spiritually vacuous lives. The discrepancies between their words and acts are satirized. Sharply contrasting with the "normal," the internally handicapped and the spiritually disturbed, such as the Misfit in "A Goodman Is Hard to Find," remind the reader of Job, an Old Testament hero, who challenges a silent God demanding to know the reason of his sufferings. Some of O'Connor's characters are to be looked at as one of "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness," though they fail to accept Christ's invitation. When O'Connor dramatizes the agony of a soul that sees the universe to be a void, she shows a grotesque state of chaos that dominates over her fictional world. Thus the setting of her fiction implies more than just the Southern society. What we read is the condition of man in the modern western civilization that has proclaimed the death of God. Here we meet Christ-haunted ghosts who yearns for the reality of Christ's gospel but is never able to come out of the chaotic depths of unbelief.6KJ00004272402論文Articledepartmental bulletin pape