Degree Year
1989
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Keywords
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor, Greenleaf, The Lame Shall Enter First, Short stories, Math, Good, Bad, Ugly
Abstract
Flannery O'Connor was not an author who was afraid to take drastic measures, or to be on familiar terms with a deep mystery. She, like the great mathematicians, had points she wanted to connect,. and was willing to tear her fabric to connect them. In her fiction, the disruption she uses to forge her paths has many incarnations. The generating forces of that disruption, and the forces generated by that disruption, can be focused into three immediately identifiable categories: comedy, violence, and the grotesque. In order to better understand O'Connor's fiction and the connections between the taxed analogy of complex numbers, her writing, and her philosophy, these three topics will be dealt with one at a time; though examples from all of her short fiction will be supplied, the discussion will pivot on three stories more or less spanning O'Connor's short-fiction canon: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1952), "Greenleaf" (1956), and "The Lame Shall Enter First" (1962).
Repository Citation
Schwartz, John Benjamin, "Breaking and Connecting in the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor: "The Look of This Fiction is Going to be Wild" (Grace Minus Nature Equals Mystery)" (1989). Honors Papers. 590.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/590
