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The Action of Grace in the stories of Flannery O’Connor
“The purpose of religion is to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,”
Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Sunday, February 28: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Guest speaker William Sessions
Sunday, March 7: “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
Sunday, March 14: “Revelation”
This is not a class where one person will lecture, but where all participants are invited to share. Please read each story before the Sunday we discuss it. Everyone is welcome, but if you wish to discuss the stories, you need to have read them recently. Stories are available online at http://www.bookrags.com/The_Complete_Stories_of_Flannery_O'Connor
If you have questions or comments as you read, I would be thrilled if you would email them to oconnor@manmartin.net
You can also get this information at manmartin.net, by clicking the tab for Flannery O’Connor
I’ve read the story, and I want to contribute; how will I find something to say? It may help to think of this chart. You might consider if there’s anything that strikes you in one of the following categories.
| How does the story relate to itself? That is, what happened in the story to surprise you? Are there passages in the story you consider especially well written, or poorly written? Are there any parts that stand out as perplexing, or as if they don’t belong? (These parts are frequently very important.) Is the ending satisfying, why or why not? |
Text to Other Texts Does the story remind you of other stories you have read, seen on film or on tv? Maybe it only reminds you of them in minor ways; how do the stories differ? |
| Text to You Does this story or the characters remind you of experiences you yourself have had? How was your experience similar and different from that in the story. |
Text to World How does this story connect to events in the larger world? What happens in this story that we can all relate to? |
THEMES IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR:
GRACE: In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor writes, "There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment." A character "recognizes his need for repentance and either accepts or ignores the opportunity.”
DEATH, VIOLENCE, AND MISFORTUNE: "I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace," she tells us. She goes on to explain that "This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world… I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”
CONVENTIONAL MORALITY VS CHRISTIANITY: O’Connor’s characters are frequently “moral” in the conventional sense; they spout the expected pieties, maintain a respectable reputation, and are sometimes politically correct on the important social issues of the day – but frequently this shallow morality masks a denial of God’s Grace.
INFLUENCES:
ST AUGUSTINE: Believed there are things to be used and things to be loved. The world itself is a thing to be used. (This is not to say that we should despoil the environment.) But the world itself is not our home, rather a place we journey through as we head our real home, which is Heaven. As beautiful as this world is, we are not meant to love it – say Augustine and O’Connor, and when things happen that make us uncomfortable here, this is Grace.
JEAN PAUL SARTRE and ALBERT CAMUS: The French Existentialists had a profound impact on O’Connor, in part because of their adamant placing of all responsibility for action on the individual. “There are no innocent victims,” Sartre said. Characters in O’Connor stories frequently blame their lot on upbringing, social status, and physical disability, but in everything that is essential, O’Connor believes, human freewill operates unrestrained.
Paradoxically, to the existentialists, acceptance of mortality is liberating. At the moment we accept the finality and inevitability of death, we are free to become what we freely choose. This idea is a very important one in O’Connor’s story.