The Benefit of Believing
Southern Gothic writing has been around since the 18th century. Many have written under this genre, but writers such as Flannery O’Connor have perfected it and made it popular. In Flannery O’Conner’s literary works, she gives both the characters and various events a grotesque persona in order to give an exaggerated point of view of life. She over stresses in order to show how life can be horrible if you don’t put your faith into something. Having no faith leaves one feeling baron, empty, and in tragedy. A few of O’Conner’s stories that display this theme are Wise Blood, ‘Good Country People,’ ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,’ and ‘Greenleaf.’
In Flannery O’Conner’s novel, Wise Blood, the main character, Hazel Motes, is
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The grandmother’s characteristics regrettably make her the worst character of the whole family. While her grandchildren are annoying and sassy, she is manipulative, persistence (in a negative way), and a liar. She hears about a killer and tries to scare her child so that she can get the family vacation she dreamed of. She tells Bailey, "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is loose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn 't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that loose in it. I couldn 't answer to my conscience if I did” (pg. 454). When her son doesn’t comply, she convinces them to at least visit a plantation during their trip. She thinks she knows where she’s going, but her lie leads to the car crashing. After the wreckage, a man appears. They all think its help, but they are wrongly mistaken. When The Misfit appears, he slowly executes the grandmother’s whole family, except for her. The entire time, she speaks to him about how well he is and how there’s still time for him to change who he is. She attempts to communicate and change the mentality of The Misfit. Constantly, she tells him, "Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ." (pg.) The pressure she puts on him to embrace his religion only irritates him. Due to his loss of faith, religion, and hope, he feels no remorse. Trying to help him find his faith, “She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest” (pg.467). She is shot due to her belief and
And because of her actions, she puts her family and herself in a terrible situation, which leads to the demise of them all. Grandmother’s dishonesty begins when she brings her cat along for the trip to Florida. She does so behind her son’s back, because she knows that he will not approve. This would seem harmless initially, however, secretly bringing the cat along turns out to be a terrible idea. Another example of the grandmother’s dishonesty is when she lies about the old house that she wants to see.
Firstly, her being a "grandmother" immediately places her in the "innocent old lady" archetype - she does not wrong and loves everyone, but is fragile due to age and needs others to take care of her. The children insulting the grandmother's native state of Georgia adds to this effect - The grandmother is the victim of harm - minor harm here but it foreshadows major harm (death) soon to follow. The grandmother, being a grandmother, is powerless to stop the harm from befalling her.
Wise Blood and The Catholicism By Reem Abbas 43380421 Flannery O’Connor is one of the greatest Southern writers during the twentieth century. She is considered as a faithful and a good Christian writer. In her fiction, she never neglects her Catholic concerns. The large respect for O'Connor’s religion appears in most of her literary works.
The story gives way of foreshadowing the unfortunate ending in several instances. The first one is when Grandmother Bailey is trying to change the destination of the trip by showing her son the newspaper article about the man that escaped from the penitentiary. "Here this that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it”
She only looks for problems in the world around her and is quick to criticize people other than herself. Her interaction with The Misfit clearly shows how selfish she truly is. When The Misfit shows up after their car veers off the road, the grandmother and her family’s life is put in danger. She never once seems to care about the fate of her grandchildren when their lives are threatened by The Misfit (Mitchell). Instead, the first thing that the grandmother does is think about herself and question The Misfit’s will to murder a lady (referring to herself).
In the story, the grandmother is promptly filled with practically otherworldly love and comprehension that are from God. She treats The Misfit as a kindred enduring person whom she is committed to love because of that moment of grace that God gives her at a sudden. (Every individual should have compassion to others and love his kindred people like himself, even his foes. As Jesus instructs all of us to. )
He has confusion about religion. Whereas the grandmother accepts faith wholeheartedly and without any doubt, the Misfit experiments religious beliefs and decides on how he should follow them or not. He has chosen to live by the notion that religion is meaningless and remains to his own kind of religion when he says, ‘”Jesus [is] the only One that ever [raises] the dead… If He
When the family is on the trip, they pass a little black boy with no pants on, and the grandmother says, "little niggers in the country don't have things like we do" (398). This is just one instance where the grandmother shows how judgemental she is. She did not know anything about the boy or his family, but continued to talk bad about people who live in the country. After the wreck and being discovered by the Misfit, the grandmother knows she is in trouble and begins telling the Misfit
and they are all planning a trip to Florida. Although it has been decided that they are going to Florida, the grandmother is frustrated and tries to convince her son and his family that they should go to Tennessee instead since more family lives there and there are sights to see there. She also argues that going to Florida would only put the family in danger as there was a serial killer on the loose who goes by the name of “Misfit”. This, in itself, already raises a red flag for readers since they just so happen to be travelling to a place where a serial killer is running loose. Despite the grandmother’s protests against their trip to Florida, they all get in the car and begin their journey.
The speaker’s grandmother is originally presented in a way that causes the ending to be a surprise, saying, “Her apron flapping in a breeze, her hair mussed, and said, ‘Let me help you’” (21-22). The imagery of the apron blowing in the wind characterizes her as calm, and when she offers to help her grandson, she seems to be caring and helpful. Once she punches the speaker, this description of her changes entirely from one of serenity and care to a sarcastic description with much more meaning than before. The fact that the grandmother handles her grandson’s behavior in this witty, decisive way raises the possibility that this behavior is very common and she has grown accustomed to handling it in a way that she deems to be effective; however, it is clearly an ineffective method, evidenced by the continued behavior that causes her to punish the speaker in this manner in the first place.
The grandmother uses Jesus as a scapegoat to show how she is a child of God while the Misfit tells of how he really perceives Jesus and that there is no justification of his actions. In the event of the car accident, the Grandmother was left with a physical crisis that quickly showed as her family was sent off into the woods to be killed one by one. This soon transitioned to a spiritual crisis both between the Grandmother and the Misfit as she uses Jesus's name to try and escape her fate. This spiritual crisis leads the characters to express their personal conception of reality and how they perceive the revelation of the situation that they are in. The Grandmother has a sense that reality should revolve around her and that she should manipulate tools such as religion to benefit her outcome.
She is only trying to convince the misfit that he is a good man because she wants to be freed, and her life is in shambles. Also, the grandmother has already gone back on her word multiple of times, calling the misfit a big, bad, and scary man. Now all of the sudden he is a good man. Therefore, the grandmother still has not changed a
While television shows don’t necessarily reflect the ideals and values of the creator, O’Connor’s tend to do just that. Flannery O’Connor’s life in the south and her belief in Christ greatly influenced the vitality of her characters, the messages articulated within her stories, and the style in which she wrote her work. The vitality of her characters: The characters in
The story opens with a man named Bailey who is going on a trip with his family to Florida. However, his mother had other plans and becomes the "manipulative grandmother lecturing her apathetic son" (Sparrow). At first she tries to convince her son to change the trip destination saying ""(O 'Connor). It might be inferred that she meant well by warning Bailey about the prison escapee traveling in the same direction. Unfortunately, later in the story the reader finds out that .
In two southern short stories “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner, and “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston, the main characters resolve conflicts in an ironic manner. In “ Father’s and Son’s: The Spiritual Quest in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”, Oliver Billingslea briefly discusses the irony within Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”. Irony in a persistent theme within southern gothic literature. In Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” Sarty choses to solve his problems through defiance, his rebellion can be seen as a replication of his father’s, the very thing he is resentful of.