Flannery O8217Conner and Grotesque Characters :: essays papers

Flannery O8217Conner and rattling(a) CharactersFlannery OConner and Grotesque Characters One of the approximately interesting characteristics of Flannery OConners writing is her penchant for creating characters with bodily or mental disabilities. Though critics sometimes unkindly labeled her a maker of rattling(a)s, this talent for creating flawed characters served her well. In fact, though termed grotesque, OConners intent of vivid visual imagery when describing plurality 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 baddie is a one armed hobo named Tom T. Shiftlet. Using his endowment of gab and the promise of tightening the place up. He manages to take up on the remote farm of an old charr name d Lucynell Crater and her mentally retarded and completely deaf daughter Lucynell Crater. The old woman quickly decides that despite his handicap she would like to make Tom her news in law. His goal soon became, fix up the old motor gondola he was sleeping in and hightail it out of there with the car and some of the old womans money 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 humbug ends with him marrying the retarded daughter, leaving with her on a honeymoon trip, and then abandoning her in a rundown dining car on the side of the road. Good Country People is a story about Joy Hopewell, a very well educated youth woman living in the rural south. Joy lost 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 lite heart and it was this affliction that forced her to remain amongst these good country people whom sh e considered to be intellectual inferiors. Though she had great confidence in her comprehension she had very little self-esteem. Joys handicap made her feel atrocious, so ugly that much to her mothers dismay, she had her name legally changed to the ugliest one she could think of, Hulga. One twenty-four hour period a traveling bible gross revenueman named Manley Pointer made a sales call and ended up having dinner with the family.