MeganRitter

O’Connor and Death: Faith and Suffering
Or, Why So Gloomy, Flannery?

•Flannery O’Connor’s portrayal of the issues surrounding death has come under fire from some critics who say that her work is evidence of a lack of basic compassion.
•Her critics aren’t wrong when they say that O’Connor’s images of death are completely without any kind of human sentiment BUT this is not because she was an awful, insensitive, cold-hearted person.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
•Her entire family is evidently gunned down. Does the grandmother give any evidence of caring? Not really. No.
•Immediately after shooting the grandmother, The Misfit picks up a cat to cradle it. He’s just gunned a person down and is now showing affection to a cat. The Misfit is meant to be slightly imbalanced, yes, but it is powerful symbolism that he will show tenderness to an animal while completely disregarding human life. (O’Connor 29)
•The Misfit is a murderer, but is not really such a bad man. He praises his parents to the skies, shows all the little courtesies of a proper Southern gentleman, and freely discusses his ideas about theology and morality. That the purveyor of death can be shown in such a sympathetic light is indicative of O’Connor’s theories that maybe death wasn’t really such a bad thing. (O’Connor 22-29)
“The River”
•Bevel/Harry is just a child, yes the image is clear that he embraces his own death. He certainly is rational terms may be unaware of the implications of what he does. However, we have grown accustomed to the Dylan Thomas sentiment that we must “not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and it shocks us that anyone, but especially such a little boy, would embrace death not in this way, not as a the means of escape that some believe suicide offers, but as something to strive for. Imagine for a moment what a stir this must have created in the more innocent world of the 1940s South. (O’Connor 22-29)
“A Late Encounter With the Enemy”
•Sally Poker is on pins and needles that her grandfather won’t live until her graduation. This isn’t because she’s especially fond of her own kin who she’s lived with for probably all of her life. It is instead because she wants the status that comes from having her grandfather sit on the platform as a dignitary. (O’Connor 155-156)
•He dies in the middle of the stage and nobody notices. Wait, what? (O’Connor 168)
“The Displaced Person”
•When Mrs. Shortley dies, Mrs. McIntyre tells us that “anyone would have thought they were kin” (O’Connor 240). She also tells us that it took her three days to get over the death of this person who was like kin to her. Three days. (O’Connor 240)
•Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and their African-American farmhand all see that Guizac is about to be crushed to death by a tractor, a pretty horrible fate. The text never describes them as “frozen with shock and horror” or anything redeeming like that. They apparently just don’t care. (O’Connor 249-250)
•Mrs. McIntyre is fairly annoyed when she catches the priest administering last rites to Guizac. (O’Connor 250)

•One problem I have had with my thesis – I guess this would be the antithesis – is the problem of proving that O’Connor was not trying to make a point about the inhumanity of her characters in depicting death so dispassionately.
Possible answers to antithesis
-It is significant, I think, that none of the reactions of her characters are consciously cruel. (Even the Misfit can come off as a lovable nut.) Her characters are simply apathetic. It is as if death is a non-issue, which, to O’Connor, it was.
-I’m open to polite guidance.
Why O’Connor Wasn’t Just Cold-Hearted and Crazy
•O’Connor understood better than most the inevitability of death. It is significant that she watched her father die of lupus, so that she could virtually chart the course of her own illness according to her memories of his brief life. In her mind, I would imagine, it’s going to come when it comes, so why should anyone bother to fight it?
•O’Connor’s Catholic faith told her that heaven offered something better than anything that could be found on earth. This is most clearly illustrated in “The River” with the tragic tale of Bevel/Harry.
•To O’Connor, there was a kind of spiritual purity in death that we all should be striving for all our lives. This philosophy is illustrated again most clearly by Bevel, but also by The Misfit’s little epigram on the grandmother’s life.
•O’Connor: “For me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in this world I see in its relation to that.” For O’Connor the central aim and end of human life was your faith journey toward the face-to-face encounter with Jesus Christ himself. Death is simply the last step on that journey, the portal to a world where Jesus lived. How could she possibly think death was a bad thing if it brought her that close to Jesus? Instead, it was something to be celebrated.