Flannery

O'Connor's writing has been described as alternately as Grotesque, Southern, and Catholic. In reality it's probably a combination of the three. She wanted her readers to experience a sense of something beyond the ordinary and to shock people into seeing distortions of modern life. Fueled by her Roman Catholic beliefs, she felt that the reader should be able to experience the sacred Ð'-- without sentimentality Ð'-- through her fiction; there is a real sense throughout her writing of a people living in a fallen world. That idea of fallenness was likely greatly influenced by her experience of growing up white in the post-Civil War South (primarily Georgia). This sense emerges in her characters, who seem to never quite realize what their lives are lacking. Throughout her work is the style she was famous for: a jolted disruption of the mundane, funny but horrifying.

As for brokenness, all of O'Connor's stories focus on an idea of brokenness and this is reflected in a tangible manner through her characters. Chronologically early in her writing, her characters may singularly be morally, religiously, or financially broken, but the stories she wrote later in her career also have her characters physically "broken" with missing limbs, deformities, and mental illness. For example, in Good Country People Hulga-Joy (how I fondly recall the character from class discussion) has a prosthetic leg and all of the characters can be described as broken or corrupt in a fashion.

Another theme I find fascinating, but that appears less in her writings, are her many characters relationship with the academy and education versus the "uneducated." (By uneducated I do mean to imply ignorance or stupidity (though it would apply for certain stories), but simply characters that have received formal or public education.) This creates a terrific tension of displacement similar to Jane Austen's character Harriet in Emma, who receives enough