Thursday, October 23, 2014

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," who is the deepest thinker among the characters?

In O'Connor's short stories, including "A Good Man is Hard
to Find," no one is a deep thinker: all are flat, static "wingless chickens" who care
only for the material world, not the spiritual one.  Remember, O'Connor is a comic
writer: a spiritual satirist.  She believes in the opposite of what her characters
do.


In her stories all have fallen from grace; all are
blind to their spiritual doom.  When reading O'Connor's prose one can feel the laws of
attraction at work: good begets good; evil begets evil. Syntheses and concessions are
pitfalls. Either one is Christ-centered or hell-bent toward the fumes of the gas
chamber. Her poles are distinct and opposing, the slippery slope a descent to
hell.


Her comic religious vision holds that a morally and
socially degenerate (like the Misfit) is nonetheless spiritually a cut above the
wingless chickens of privileged Christianity (the grandmother and her family). She
shocks her readers by beginning with divine evil (the Misfit's murders) as a backdoor to
what is divine good so that they may rediscover what is holy (to not take salvation for
granted). Her goal, I think, is to prevent her readers from taking sides among her
religious forms; instead, she calls for action--from them to be
seekers instead of being found.


In the
story it's the Misfit vs. the grandmother.  While the latter characterizes the former as
"a good boy," the Misfit acknowledges the modern man's spiritual predicament, an echo of
Dostoevsky's "If there is no God, then anything is permissible," when he
says:



Jesus
was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn't have done it. He shown
everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow
away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but
enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning
down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but
meanness.



Instead of having
her characters "follow Him," she has them all "enjoy the few minutes [they] got left" by
"killing," "burning down" houses, and "other meanness."  Not exactly deep
thinking...

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