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Example research essay topic: Flannery O Connor Rises Must Converge - 1,525 words

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The Symbiotic Relationship of Violence and Grace Extending reality outward until it embraced religious mystery, says Gilbert H. Muller (56), is something that Flannery O Connor did with extraordinary finesse. The mystery of grace captivated her and she used violence to shock both her characters and readers into making a decision about grace. O Connor used violence to illustrate the pointlessness of a purely secular world and the indispensable need of God to correct the absurdity of man s condition. Violence permits the individual to undergo remarkable transformations (Muller 93), which we see very clearly in her writings. In each work, the violence of love is synonymous with faith and it becomes clear that it is God s love, which allows grace to enter in.

The purpose of violence throughout O Connor s stories is not obvious to the naked eye; you have to delve deeper in order to see more than just the entertaining story, to see the truth behind the fiction. As James Grimshaw states, grotesqueness and violence lead inevitably to an opportunity for revelation and Grace (37), and so it is for the main characters in Greenleaf, Everything that Rises must Converge, and Revelation. In Greenleaf, Mrs. May s hideousness is revealed to the reader through the description of her appearance, and her single mindedness. Her eyes cannot see beyond her present surroundings and thus she is missing the gift of grace. Violence is needed since she is estranged from both community and grace (Muller 76) and in order to present her with opportunity for a revelation, hence the shockingly gory death of Mrs.

May. During this scene, the eyes of her soul are opened and while Mr. Greenleaf is shooting the bull and the force of the bullets are raking the beasts body, she has her moment of revelation. For Julian s mother, in Everything that Rises must Converge, the epiphany of grace comes when she is whacked by a purse. Amidst these first two short stories (i. e.

Greenleaf and Everything that Rises must Converge), the discovery of God s love happens right away, but in the story Revelation, in which Mrs. Turpin is the main character, the soul-shaking truth takes longer to sink in. Ruby Turpin is exposed to a violent and spiritual attack; such ferocity of assault was obviously necessary to unbend her proud spirit. The revelation that comes to her at last is confirmation of her own insignificance in the spiritual order (Walters 128). As Miles Orvell puts it, the mystery of the flesh crucified is the emotional crux of her writings, for the discovery of the mystery of reality whether in the shape of grace of exclusion from grace is always painful for her characters and almost always violent (64). Flannery O Connor uses literary extremes, and thus buries the grace deep inside of her stories so that it doesn t jump out at the reader.

What then does stand out? As mentioned above, the first impression one gets from O Connor s writing is the violent and grotesque. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, when speaking of church art said, it s a wonderful sort of hideous beauty and beautiful deformity. That statement appears to make no sense because of its contradictory terms, but when you stop and consider what would make both St. Bernard and Flannery O Connor use the hideous synonymously with beauty, the truth of such a statement becomes inarguable.

The only solution for violence, and ultimately the ugliness of sin, is grace. Christ s death on the cross is the utmost example of violence and ugliness that resulted in the highest form of grace possible, therefore it is only natural that O Connor would capitalize on this awesome reality we have been offered. God s grace has been embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, who is therefore, the agent of redemption (Orvell 61). Flannery says, for me, the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.

Compared to God, everything is grotesque, and perhaps that is why Flannery O Connor focuses so much on those things that most people would rather overlook. She maneuvers her characters through dark and impenetrable mazes which seemingly lead nowhere, but which unexpectedly reveal an exit into Christianity s back yard. While she affirms the contradictory aspects of the universe, her fiction nevertheless embodies a transcending principle of order. For Miss O Connor spiritual vitality lies precisely in the strength of the antithesis between the negative aspects of the grotesque and the affirmation of religion (Muller 58). Thus, she believes that there is an understanding between the two.

In essence, they have a symbiotic relationship; the affirmation of religion depends on people s response to the negative aspects of the grotesque and disfigured. Common everyday confrontations, are where the distortions in character originate due to the sudden irrationality or horror of what s familiar, causing a panic because the ability of how to respond is unknown. The violence which induces such a panic, cause revelatory suffering in the lives of Flannery O Connor s characters they encounter suffering and damnation not because God has predetermined their destruction, but because of their own free will they have abandoned their quest for grace (Muller 84). She states that the subject of her work is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil (Mystery and Manners 118). She tries to portray in each story an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable (118), often an act of violence, violence being the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially (113). Through violence, she wants to evoke Christian mystery.

This goes back to the basic building block of her writing in which she wants to uncover the mystery of grace, through whatever means will bring about such revealing. Violence is strangely capable of returning humans to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. By nature, however, we resist grace because as O Connor says, grace changes us and the change is painful. Though human kind may resist, it cannot run from the fact that grace is constantly present in our lives.

Flannery O Connor believed that our lives were slow and sometimes-painful progressions along individual spiritual journeys, and that each bit of grace we received helped us to grow in our spirituality and prepared us for what may lay ahead. In short, O Connor summed up our lives in the phrase grace under construction. God is handing our little bits of grace throughout the varied course of our individual lives and violence comes into play because it forces us to receive that grace. Teil hard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest said this: God must, in some way or other, make room for Himself, hollowing us out and emptying us, if He is finally to penetrate into us.

And in order to assimilate us in Him, He must break the molecules of our being so as to re-cast and re-model us. This not necessarily a comfortable time for us, because it will require change, but it must happen because sin is in the basic human nature. For example, in Flannery O Connor s short story, Revelation, the characters are set in a doctor s waiting room. The significance of this is that she is showing us that everyone is sick and waiting for healing to be made available to them. Everyone is sick with sin and in need of God s grace so that we might be healed. The contradictions of violence and faith in her fiction, distinguish Flannery O Connor from the majority of Christian authors.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil, said O Connor. The devil aids in the division between man and his environment which then produces what Flannery O Connor portrays in her short stories as being grotesque or absurd. This grotesqueness is in turn used to establish the moral and aesthetic climate of her works reason being that moral and religious dilemmas cannot be illuminated without violence. Thus, the line is drawn between violence and grace and though it is not completely understandable, we are able to grasp a portion of what Flannery O Connor portrays so well in her writings insight to human weakness whilst being both harsh and compassionate.

She shows us how revelation occurs in unforeseen moments, such as in response to violence, and how grace then descends in unexpected ways (Walters 116). Bibliography I. Books Fitzgerald, Robert and Sally, O Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Farrar, Straus &# 038; Giroux, LLC, c. 1969 Grimshaw Jr. , James A. , The Flannery O Connor Companion, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, c. 1981 Muller, Gilbert H. , Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O Connor and the Catholic Grotesque, University of Georgia Press, Athens, c. 1972 Orvell, Miles, Flannery O Connor: An Introduction, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London, c. 1991 Walters, Dorothy, Flannery O Connor, Twayne Publishers, Boston, c. 1973


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Research essay sample on Flannery O Connor Rises Must Converge

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