The journey home to the true country: A study of Flannery O'Connor's fiction

Flannery O'Connor's "story of mythic dimensions--one in which everyone is able to recognize the hand of God and its descent"--is the story of man's redemptive journey home to the "true country"--the country, which "the writer with Christian conviction will consider what is eternal and absolute." The journey narrative, which appears with impressive frequency in American literature, is utilized as a central structural device in almost all of O'Connor's thirty-one stories and two novels.; The dissertation consists of five chapters. The introductory chapter attempts to place O'Connor in the long line of American writers of the darker imagination--the Hawthornean Nay-sayers--who envision Americans as journeyers carrying a weighty luggage of the herditary sin and guilt on a darkly perilous road.; Chapter Two, entitled "Man on the Go," deals with the literal and physical journey in O'Connor's first collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find. The journey in this collection can be roughly divided into two movements: the outward movement of the traveler-protagonist from his smug, self-enclosed world and the inward movement of the intruder-antagonist into the settled life of a self-intoxicated character.; Chapter Three, entitled "The World on the Rise," deals with O'Connor's posthumously published volume, Everything that Rises Must Converge. Most of the stories in this collection render the character's movement out of the horizontal plane onto the vertical--toward a climactic visionary experience.; Chapter Four discusses Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. The key plot pattern of O'Connor's two novels is the circular journey movement of escape from and return to God, which corresponds to the three major phases of the heroic adventure, as described by Joseph Campbell: departure--trial--return.; The concluding chapter of this study examines "Parker's Back," the story completed on the author's deathbed, from which we may draw O'Connor's final words regarding her Christian vision. Through Parker, who is finally "back" to the "GOD ABOVE," O'Connor realizes the imaginative fulfillment of her journey home to the true country. Through the Byzantine Christ on Parker's back, which transfigures the haphazard patchwork on Parker's skin into a perfect aesthetic harmony, O'Connor also resolves the conflict between the two sets of eyes that dictate her art--the writer's and the Church's.