The Stories of O'Connor by Flannery O'Connor

First published:A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1955; Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965; The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, 1971

Critical Evaluation

Criticism of Flannery O’Connor’s two novels and two original collections of short stories notes the dramatic power of the nineteen stories in her two collections but is repelled by their shocking conclusions. If readers could narrow their application to the South from whence they come, as they can with TOBACCO ROAD, for example, they would be much happier; but since her stories deal wholly with universals and are pervaded by an irony that seems both to involve and to mock, readers are forced to recognize that her vision encompasses the human condition, the naked spectacle of mortal man. O’Connor is not claiming so much as she is reminding that the human condition is fourfold: people are sinners, people shall die, people are equal in the sight of God, and people cannot expect to understand God’s mercy but must recognize it in whatever outrageous form it appears, which is the beginning of salvation. Her term for that recognition is the “revelation” of sin, or death, or equality, and the beginning of “redemption.” She does not follow the process of redemption, only its initiation through whatever unlikely instrument God chooses. Both O’Connor and her God are ironists, and readers and all her heroes are willful characters who must be humbled in learning that the will of God must prevail. This is the guiding vision in all her work.

Most of the titles in A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND are ironically intended and provide a key to the author’s meaning. Three of the shortest stories show her intention most clearly: “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The first describes the progress up four flights of stairs of Ruby Hill, who is terrified of having a baby and gradually realizes, as she climbs, that she is four months pregnant. This is the “stroke of good fortune” her palmist foretold; from the most unlikely sources comes the truth about Ruby’s “condition.” The second story shows how death and truth come to “General” Sash of the Confederacy at the late age of one hundred and four; he is no general but he is surrounded by false memories of the Confederacy, especially at the Atlanta premiere of GONE WITH THE WIND, and he joins in the pretense. Death, the enemy, did not get him during the Civil War, but eventually he catches up, even with a Confederate general. In the last of the three stories, both a hermaphrodite and a platitudinous nun are shown to be “a temple of the Holy Ghost”; the outrageous and the comic are also clear signs of the truth for those who can both appreciate the ridiculous and get its message.

The other stories in the first collection fall into two groups: four independent stories that are related by theme; and three stories that use the same setting and similar cast. The latter group contains “A Circle in the Fire,” “Good Country People,” and the longest story O’Connor wrote, “The Displaced Person,” which is the culmination of the volume. The common situation is an independent widow running a farm with the help of a succession of tenant farmers and some blacks. In the first two stories, the tenant farmer’s wife acts as cool observer, like the black in THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, who offers a practical but unacceptable solution to the awkward situation which arises when an intruder arrives at the farm; in the last story, the tenant farmer’s wife dies and becomes the motive for the “accidental” death of the “Displaced Person.” The meaning of the stories seems to be that if one embarks on an act of charity one must be very sure of one’s motives. Mrs. Hopewell, in “Good Country People,” may be mistaken in her notions of country folk; certainly her ideas led her educated daughter astray and thus to a realization of the truth about herself, that she is in no way superior to what her mother calls “good country people.” The play of ambiguity in these two stories is resolved in the last by identifying Christ as a person displaced from Mrs. McIntyre’s heart; when He comes to her in the guise of a Displaced Person, she allows Him to be crucified again. It is not sufficient to be “nice”—a theme that recurs whenever this farm setting is used—one must be saved even at the cost of one’s life. Mrs. McIntyre, like many of O’Connor’s characters, is dying as the result of her revelation, the late reconciliation of word and deed.

The other group of four stories may be distinguished by the death or salvation of the protagonists. The stories are remarkable for the creation of a totally independent universe for each; “The River” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” contain the contrast between the well-to-do and the poor and end in death. The gentle death in the former of the four-year-old child seeking some meaning to his empty life is violently contrasted with the deaths of father, mother, baby, two children, and grandmother in the latter. O’Connor liked to read this story to her audiences, almost as if she were daring her hearers to face the truth in its most hideous manifestation. Solicitude for the family and the niceness of the grandmother notwithstanding, they will all perish at the hands of “The Misfit.” The nickname is highly ironic: he is a “misfit” because he cannot find salvation or meaning to life and he knows his fallen condition. He is not, however, a “misfit” in a society of misfits who do not know their fallen condition and in turn call him a “misfit.” A “good man” is not merely “hard to find”; without God he does not exist, and with God he knows he is a sinner.

The other two stories in this last group from A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND are “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “The Artificial Nigger.” In the former, the revelation is accomplished by a road sign Mr. Shiftlet sees when he abandons his idiot bride; both the sign and the idiot are common devices in O’Connor’s work to represent a truth beneath the surface. The latter story became the title of the English edition of this collection; O’Connor was displeased at the choice because of the inevitable and slipshod references to the South in her work and because, as in all her writing, the ironic meaning of the title belongs in the context of the story. In “The Artificial Nigger,” the remark to that effect prompts the reconciliation between old Mr. Head and his estranged grandson, Nelson, whom he has denied. This is probably the happiest story O’Connor wrote, and it is important to her work in two ways: Nelson is the forerunner of the heroes of her two novels, and her guiding vision is most succinctly and clearly stated in the next to last paragraph where Mr. Head sees that God’s mercy is not a soothing balm but a burning flame that purifies the sinner.

The stories in the second collection, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, also fall into three groups. The first group comes early in the collection and in its material, corresponding roughly to the widow-farmer group in the first volume, seems to have come more directly from O’Connor’s own experience. This first group includes the title story, “Greenleaf,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “The Comforts of Home.” Each contains a spinsterish youngish bachelor and his mother; the Angel of the Lord appears as a bull, a black mother, a delinquent girl, and blasts the complacency of the young man or the mother.

The second group of stories—“A View of the Woods,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Judgment Day”—corresponds roughly to the last group in the first volume. Each story has a world of its own which is vividly created, though all part of the same countryside, and the characters would seem remote from the writer’s experience if one did not know that, like John Millington Synge, she liked to stand behind the kitchen door and listen to “good country people” yarn with her mother. In two stories, the meaning is clear: The saved and fearless soul so profoundly affects the hero’s complacency in his way of life that, shaken, he tries to imitate the saved; his revelation is that he must seek his own way to God. In the last story in this group, “Judgment Day,” the meaning is less clear; ambiguity plays around the central character and leaves the reader uncertain as to whether his way of life is that of salvation or not. One suspects the former because his antagonist is the city and a well-to-do daughter, and as far as O’Connor was concerned, both were passports to hell.

Two stories in the second collection complement each other in that their titles seem interchangeable. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is the best example of O’Connor’s reworking of a situation, for the story is a rewriting and expansion of the second part of THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, omitting the preliminary farm and family history and the later return to the country. The infirmities of Rayber, the protagonist of the novel, are transferred to the protagonist of the story, Rufus Johnson, a boy with a clubfoot, a bad past, and not a trace of Southern charm. He remains a mystery to Sheppard, the welfare officer determined to rescue the boy’s I.Q. from his circumstances and his religion; the attention is on Sheppard, an indictment of the intellect, or false education, as the chief begetter of complacency and “niceness.” Although this view sometimes betrays O’Connor into a glorification of corn pone as the simple true bread of life, this lapse does not occur in “Revelation,” a story that draws together many of her materials and states her own vision in that afforded Mrs. Turpin in the sunset by the hog pen. The tenant farmer’s wife and the widow-farmer are brought together in Mrs. Turpin (though she is married), and the precocious or educated child becomes the messenger of her revelation in a typically clotted utterance which the protagonist must ponder until it is clarified in an awful moment of truth. Mrs. Turpin has to learn that in certain essentials she is a pig of a woman, less than the trash she so despises and that the “lame shall enter first” into Heaven, before the “nice” and capable. Mrs. Turpin thus brings up the procession of O’Connor’s characters which began in “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” So unified is her vision that the title of the first story discussed could be that of the last.

Bibliography

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Lake, Christina Bieber. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005.

O’Gorman, Farrell. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

Orvell, Miles. Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. Flannery O’Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

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Spivey, Ted R. Flannery O’Connor: The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995.