A Study Of The Subversive Narrative In Flannery O'Connor's Fiction

Flannery O'Connor,one of America's most important southern writers in the twentieth century,has left behind her short and ill-stricken life a compact and enduring legacy to the world literature—an oeuvre of thirty-one short stories and two novels.For over half a century,readers and literary critics have been fascinated by and debating about the grotesquery and profundity of O'Connor's fictional worlds.Two things that literary studies cannot bypass in O'Connor criticism are the disturbingly marginalized or violent characters she peoples her fictional world with,and the writer's unrelenting criticism of the smug and blinding secularization of her society,be it in religious,intellectual or mundane everyday settings.Accordingly,this thesis is intended to make an analysis on the portraying of her unconventional characters and the demonstration of various religiosity in O'Connor's stories in light of subversive narrative.In the analysis of her subversive narrative in portraying grotesque characters,a detailed research is made on the traditional images of innocent,vulnerable,and sanctified children,the old wise men,and the genteel ladies of American south.By contrasting these three groups of figures with the characters in O'Connor's works,namely,the evil,violent and sophisticated children,the self-righteous,ignorant old men and the unladylike southern women,this thesis argues that O'Connor's portrayal of these characters constitutes a narrative that attempts to subvert the commonly accepted stereotypes of wise elders,graceful ladies and innocent children in traditional literature.In doing so,her subversive narratives are expected to approach her purpose to awaken her fictional characters as well as her readers to a more truthful reality so that the transformation of their life may become possible.In the same way,O'Connor's religious or quasi-religious characters,both of whom claim their belief or non-belief as their religion,are also portrayed as a subversion of the mainstream religiosity.Their religiosity is reflected from their secularized concept of religious redemption,religious manners or their promotion of quasi-religious salvation.All this is either made fun of or poignantly satirized and condemned through O'Connor's relentless tearing up of their religious affectation which appears to be decent and moralistic.Through an analysis on the subversive writing in Flannery O'Connor's fiction,this thesis points out that subversive narrative serves not only as a stylistic feature of her writing,but also a way to convey the writer's deep concern with human fallenness in a secularized,materialistic world.