In her short
stories, Flannery O’Connor brings her characters to a moment of epiphany when
it is no longer possible for them to return to the old ways of life.The proud
are humbled, the ignorant are enlightened, and the hypocritical are forced to
recognize that the discrepancy between their smug surface and its hollow
spirituality is the proof of their inadequacy in the eyes of God. For
O’Connor, this epiphanal moment can only be achieved by violence and
destruction: “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable
of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment
of grace…. We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in
modern fiction, and it is always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and
meant to be an end in itself. With the serious writer, violence is never
an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we
are essentially” (“On Her Own Work”).
In the three stories
we read (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That
Rises Must Converge”), can you find any “moments of epiphany” which are
produced in extreme violent situations? How do these violent situations
“reveal” the hidden message of God? What mysterious transformations have the
characters undergone when they are shocked into an awareness of their smug
ignorance? Write an essay of 250-300 words.
