Flannery O8217Conner and Grotesque Characters :: essays papers

Flannery O8217Conner and Grotesque CharactersFlannery OConner and Grotesque Characters One of the most interesting characteristics of Flannery OConners writing is her penchant for creating characters with physical or mental disabilities. Though critics sometimes unkindly labeled her a maker of grotesques, this talent for creating flawed characters served her well. In fact, though termed grotesque, OConners use of vivid visual imagery when describing people and their shortcomings is the technique that makes her work most realistic. OConner herself once remarked that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it will be called realistic. In OConners The Life You Save May Be Your Own the villain is a one armed hobo named Tom T. Shiftlet. Using his return of gab and the promise of fixing the place up. He manages to take up on the remote farm of an old woman named Lucynell Crater and her ment ally retarded and completely deaf daughter Lucynell Crater. The old woman quickly decides that despite his handicap she would like to make Tom her son in law. His tendency soon became, fix up the old car he was sleeping in and hightail it out of there with the car and some of the old womans specie in his pocket. On the pretense that he would need it for a honeymoon trip, he convinces the old woman to fix the car and give him some cash. The tale ends with him marrying the retarded daughter, leaving with her on a honeymoon trip, then abandoning her in a rundown diner on the side of the road. Good Country flock is a story about Joy Hopewell, a rattling well educated young woman living in the rural south. Joy wooly-minded a leg in a hunting accident when she was ten and since then had been forced to wear a wooden replacement. She also had a wonky heart and it was this affliction that forced her to remain amongst these good country people whom she considered to be intellectual inf eriors. Though she had great confidence in her intelligence she had very little self-esteem. Joys handicap made her feel ugly, so ugly that much to her mothers dismay, she had her name legally changed to the ugliest one she could think of, Hulga. One day a travelling bible salesman named Manley Pointer made a sales call and ended up having dinner with the family.