Commentary on Flannery O'Connor's short stories

O'Connor's evident discontentment with society at the time has frequently been attributed to her Catholic religion, her studies in social science, and the fact that the lifestyles of the elite southern whites were diminishing. O'Connor's tales offer a sickening and repeatedly austere image of the clash between conventional Southern Christian ideals and the ever-changing social landscape of the twentieth century. Three of the core religious components that provide this outcome are the existence of divine significance, exposures to God, and the fight between the forces of good and evil. These reasons cause indications of society's downfall to be merged into her stories. One author explains, .
             "Her writing has been called the fiction of the grotesque. The word is descriptive of her characters who are often unlovable, caricatured, and deliberately distorted. O"Connor is, of course, presenting us ourselves." (Baumgaertner, 24).
             Flannery remained devoted to Catholicism throughout her life, and this along with the consciousness of her own imminent mortality gives worthy insight into what was compiled in the thirty-two short stories and the two novels: a bitter perception of salvation, a confident view of violence as an oblige for good, and a therapeutic liberation of hostility. It may give the impression that these characteristics of her writing would distort the fiction in which they are enveloped, but in fact, they act only as a means to intensify it or to enrich the ordinary, as sometimes absurdly useless proceedings that shift her plots into inspirational fables. What originally look like irrelevant deaths inevitably turn out to be prominent depictions of God's righteousness. One critic states, .
             "The self-deluded, prideful characters that receive the unbearable revelation of their own shallow selves are being impaled upon the holy icicle of grace, even if they are too stupid or lost to understand the great boon God is providing them.