The relationship or Catholic, Grotesque and Southern Aspects in Flannery O'Connor Short Stories

This work attemptes to disclose the aspects of Catholicism, Grotesque and Southernism in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. It proves that the author used the three aspects in order to reveal the core of Southern society through the looking-glass of Catholicism for that purpose that employing grotesque characters and situations, which also provided the tools for a critique. Catholic, grotesque and southern aspects, although sometimes in disguise, are the subject freely canvassed in Flannery O'Connor's fiction because she was in the position to see things in a way that was denied to many others. She was a devout Catholic all her life; she possessed a gift for writing coupled with emotional maturity; and overriding all, she had both vision and humility. She was also born and raised in the American South (Georgia) and lived most of her adult life there. Consequently, as a fiction writer, O'Connor was furnished with the unique opportunity to both observe and record the Protestant South with its Calvinist backdrop, through the lens of her Catholic faith. The stories O'Connor wrote are a valuable testament to a region that she once described as \"no longer Christ centred but still Christ haunted\". (62, 527) She saw the South as a region where most people were merely grotesque in the way they lived, thought and acted lacking a central authority that unified faith, morals and liturgical practice, but with definite empathy, she saw those same people attempting to wrestle in various and sometimes absurd ways, with belief in the Redemption of Christ. O'Connor's characters-whose humanity if not their sanity is taken for granted, and who are miserable, ugly, narrow-minded, atheistic, and of intense racial smugness and arrogance, with not a graceful, pretty one anywhere who is not, at the same time, a joke-shocked and delighted. She was for me the first great modern writer from the South. Her white male characters do not fare any better-all of them misfits, thieves, deformed madmen, idiot children, illiterates, and murderers, and her black characters, male and female, appear equally shallow, demented, and absurd. She retained a certain distance from the inner workings of her black characters by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanour and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader's imagination, to inhabit another landscape, another life, than the one she creates for them. Some reoccurring motifs of the themes she wrote on include: the theme of displacement, southern \"backwoods\" religion, comic violence, antagonistic parent/child relationships, and the question of redemption. Most of her characters will go through a drastic epiphany caused by shame or guilt in their actions; and an unlucky few will get picked off by rednecks. The reader is presented with a very vivid picture of Southern life, religion, and just life in general. Flannery O’Connor’s work is full of grotesque and violent sciences; nevertheless, it is considered \"Christian\" or \"Catholic\" writing. O'Connor's literary philosophy allowed her to use it in the service of some greater vision of spiritual reality. Because according to this philosophy, the man in a violent situation reveals those aspects of his character that he will take with him into eternity; hence such moments of grotesque and violence are an opportunity to peer into the soul of the character.Švietimo akademijaVytauto Didžiojo universiteta