Death And Salvation In Flannery O'Connor's Fiction

(Mary) Flannery O' Connor (1925-1964) occupies one of the most prominent positions in the history of post-war American literature. She was often classified into the category of the new generation of Southern writers, alongside her contemporaries like Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Catherine Anne Porter, etc. To O'Connor, being a Catholic, a Southerner and a writer are the three crucial influences upon her life. Most of her works are set in the Southern small towns and backwoods areas of the Southern "Bible Belt". Yet local color is only a vehicle to convey her spiritual concern, namely to reveal the mystery of God's grace in everyday life. In this regard, she is unique among the post-war writers. In contrast to her two novels, O'Connor's short stories have been considered as her finest works.O'Connor's stories often end with the death of one or two characters, and the repetitious death has become one of O'Connor's major themes. Apart from being the consequence of the violent acts of her grotesque characters, death has evolved into a motif linking with her religious belief, Southern heritage and personal experience. Besides, humor is employed by O'Connor as one effective technique to convey her unique vision of death in her stories.Based on textual analysis of the concrete death scenes in twelve short stories, this thesis intends to conduct a comprehensive study of O'Connor's treatment of death in terms of narrative pattern, Southern setting and symbolic meaning. Then it goes further to explore O'Connor's vision of death. Almost all these death-haunted characters have got certain revelation at the end of their lives when the touch of God's grace arrives. A kind of cold humor to blend comic elements with horrible death scenes is treated as a major technique of getting across her writing intention to the reader is also examined here. To sum up, this thesis aims at analyzing O'Connor's short stories from a new perspective by studying her treatment of death and salvation to gain a better comprehension of O'Connor's literary achievement.