Literary Analysis

(Literal Level)–What happens in the story, in your own words? (Remember that summaries should be both as comprehensive AND as succinct as possible–get as much of the story into as few words as you can)
(Interpretive Level)–What is a moment in the story that suggests something that may not be immediately obvious through figurative language or connotation?
(Critical Level)–What valuable message that can be applied to our own lives does the story convey to us, explicitly
implicitly? How is this message valuable?
RECOMMENDED: As you write about the literary work(s) you choose on the critical level, consider the use of Lite
Critical Theory in your approach. This link
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/
should both be helpful.
Reading Set #3 (Flannery O’Connor Short Stories)
Reading Set #3–Short Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Aurthor’s Biography
Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in the 1920’s in Savannah, GA, and lived for most of her years at her family’s f
smaller Georgia town of Milledgeville. When she was 15 years old, her father died of lupus, the same disease tha
later be the cause of her own death at the age of 39.
She attended the Georgia State College for Women, and while there was the editor of the school’s literary magaz
Corinthian, contributing a number of her own essays, poems, short stories, and illustrations to the publication.
In 1945 she came to the University of Iowa on a journalism scholarship, but after re-consideration and seeking so
advisement she decided to become a part of the university’s Writer’s Workshop and enter its Master’s Degree pro
writing fiction. She studied under a number of prominent authors and critics who taught at the Writer’s Workshop,
prominent author and New Critic Robert Penn Warren. The culminating project that earned O’Connor her M.F.A. i
collection of short stories under the title The Geranium (it would be her later publications that would give her far m
prominence).
She went on from her degree to be invited to live at an artists’ retreat in New York, where she continued working o
writing and collaborating and forming relationships with many different writers, including the critics Sally and Robe
Fitzgerald, whom she would live with up until 1950, when she was stricken with lupus and decided (due to the inte
treatments the disease required at that time) to return to her family home to Milledgeville, GA. O’Connor would re
family home until her death in 1964, but managed to travel on a number of occasions to deliver lectures and publi
O’Connor remained an avid writer throughout her adult life, not only in her published novels, short stories, and es
also in the hundreds of letters she wrote to her friends and colleagues.
Some Important Themes in O’Connor’s Stories
O’Connor, influenced heavily by the New Critics, personally resisted the notion that one could identify and extract
of major idea from a work of fiction. Your textbook quotes a portion of her essay “Writing Short Stories” where O’C
articulates this opinion:
“When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure tha
is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is
say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. Y
story because a statement would be inadequate” (507 – 508).
Though the opinion of an author on their own work does not have to be regarded as “the truth” about their work, a
possible to study an author’s work and glean meaning from it without having any notion of the author’s own interp
O’Connor seems to have deliberately written her stories with the intent to make singular statements about them in
to describe their meaning.
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The New Georgia Encyclopedia (Links to an external site.) writes about this aspect of the difficulty in understandin
underlying meaning in O’Connor’s fictional works, but also notes that there is a connection of this aspect to O’Con
religious beliefs:
“The body of O’Connor’s work resists conventional description. Although many of her narratives begin in the famil
quotidian world—on a family vacation or in a doctor’s waiting room, for example—they are not, finally, realistic and
not in the sense of the southern realism of William Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell (Links to an external site.). Furthe
although O’Connor’s work was written during a time of great social change in the South, those changes—and the
relationships among blacks and whites—were not at the center of her fiction. O’Connor made frequent use of viol
shock tactics. She argued that she wrote for an audience who, for all its Sunday piety, did not share her belief in t
humanity and its need for redemption. ‘To the hard of hearing,’ she explained, ‘[Christian writers] shout, and for th
blind [they] draw large and startling figures’—a statement that has become a succinct and popular explanation of
conscious intent as a writer.”
This famous quote about “the hard of hearing” is evocative of author of The Chronicles of Narnia C.S. Lewis’s ow
that the experience of pain is God’s “…megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” and hence it is a popular interpretation
O’Connor’s work that her intention of (or at least the deeper meaning that lies within) her fictional work that she in
create startling and grotesque stories that prepare her readers to be more receptive to Christian dogma. Indeed, t
Georgia Encylcopedia refers to O’Connor as a “Roman Catholic apologist.” [An “apologist” is someone who argue
merits of a particular set of beliefs with an aim to reasonably convince one’s audience that they too should becom
“believers.”]
It is certainly true that there are a number of religious themes–in particular, Christian religious themes–that one c
in O’Connor’s fiction. The need for redemption (or at least for a guilty person to be given an opportunity to start an
evil consequences of hypocrisy and false pride, the importance of truth, and long-suffering as a means of being “c
in one’s deepest self are all just a few different important meanings that one can interpret in O’Connor’s stories.
However, though O’Connor could certainly be called an apologist in her non-fiction writings for Christianity, in her
work there is nothing close to the allegorical strategies of C.S. Lewis in the Narnia books–characters may be Sata
Christ-like in her stories, but are not meant to be “stand-ins” for Satan or for Christ.
O’Connor herself claimed that her goal was not to write allegorical stories (where there is a greater spiritual mean
represented by what is on the surface) but more so anagogical stories (where what is there is meant to point the r
embrace a transcendent spiritual meaning, particularly in regard to matters of the afterlife or to the heavenly realm
textbook quotes from O’Connor’s essay “On Her Own Work”:
“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is pr
some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real
the story lies […] The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the leve
has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory th
have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow mad
with mystery” (508).
Mystery, in terms of Christian dogma, is not a “puzzle to be solved” or a “puzzle that cannot be solved,” but rather
reference to the inscrutability of what is holy. That is to say, as we are in Christian dogma fallen human beings (or
be in the presence of a holy God or even in the places where God dwells due to our sinfulness), we are utterly co
by anything that reveals God or the deeper truths of God. To encounter the truly Divine is to be undone in multiple
be laid utterly helpless. The Bible frequently describes human encounters with the Divine as ones where said hum
terrified.
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It is this aspect that O’Connor’s work seems to most closely connect to in its moments of grotesquerie and of viole
Selections for Reading Set #3
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
“Good Country People”
“The River