The Use Of Faith In Flannery O Connor's Use Of Faith?

Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith is shown heavily in her writing’s, but yet most of her characters are Protestant. Protestants fall under Western churches, and follow the principle of Reformation. Flannery wants her characters to suffer, to feel anguish and find redemption. While Flannery O’Connor has written many complex texts with different themes, her faith is always the fueling force behind her creativity. Contrary to popular belief, O’Connor’s notions have only widened her points of view in her writings. O’Connor uses faith in her work to show the readers spirituality and grace.

Flannery O’Connor’s feelings that her works should achieve something in showing grace through faith are shown in many of her works. She shows that when something

O’Connor uses faith to show grace to the extreme and in every story she writes. In the story “A Good Man is hard to Find”, the scene where she is talking to the misfit and reaches out to him and says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (Henderson, Higgins, Day, & Walker, 2009, p. 1187) according to David Huddle O’Connor is showing “the scrim of irony surrounding the characters has been stripped away, and we readers witness a flawed human being in the throes of spiritual revelation (Huddle, 2014, p. 32). By this, he is saying that O’Connor uses the writing the way she does to show how people are suffering from spiritual loss or having no grace to help them control themselves in their lives or actions. O’Connor, with her strong spiritual belief shows through her writing that we all need grace in our lives, O’Connor uses faith in her writing to lead the readers instead of just coming straight out and showing the grace. This still gets her message across that we all need to have spiritual belief and grace in something without coming out and saying it she leads the readers to their own

4). This is an excellent point, as it is clear that many of the characters O’Connor writes about face tough or “harsh” moments, usually before they face a religious influenced climax. With this in life this is when most people come to find religion and grace in their lives. An excellent example of this involves the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, as she is faced with a traumatic accident and the murdering of her family. All these terrible things happen to the grandmother, just as she has a revelation that she is not in the right place with grace and spiritual awareness. This is what Flaum is pointing out, that O’Connor uses unique ways to express her beliefs within her work, often harshly. O’Connor also uses the concepts of nature to represent grace, or perhaps the opposite. O’Connor describes the landscape in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, as being rather eerie. It’s a way of foreshadowing the events that will happen to the family. As Clark M. Brittain describes it, “the feeling that sinister forces have laid a trap for the doomed family” (Brittian par. 5). It seems like O’Connor uses the concept of God’s wraith, or some force of evil, both pertaining to the family’s faith. With a lack of grace in their lives the family is seen as being doomed because of these