The Role Of Violence In Flannery O Conner's Stories

Flannery O’Conner’s stories explain a lot when it comes to the human mind and violence. Our personalities shift and even break through when we experience something jolting. Violence can return a person to reality, because violence makes life real. Violence breaks us out of our seemingly normal day to day lives and puts reality into perspective. Violence shows us who we are, because we least expect it. Nobody knows how they will react when something happens. We either embrace the situation and fight it head on or we freeze and let it happen. Flannery O’Conner’s stories show us that our true defining moments happen when something like violence is presented to us. Her stories and characters truly define what it is like to be human and how everything can change in the blink of an eye. …show more content…
Flannery O’Conner’s characters are perfect examples of what someone essentially is when they are forced into a situation that they weren’t prepared for. In the story A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a grandmother is awakened by her experience with someone called The Misfit. In this story the grandmother continues to talk to people about the way things used to be. She states, “Children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then” (Conner 424). This is the point in the story where you begin to realize that the grandmother believes that things used to be better. She believes that things should continue to be as they once were. At the end of the story, the grandmother has a “moment of grace” when she finally meets The Misfit. She says to The Misfit, “You’ve got