Conflict In Flannery O Connor's Good Country People

Improved Essays
Flannery O’Connor’s unique southern gothic style defies expectations of a good story in her writing Good Country People, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Everything that Rises Must Converge. All three stories incorporate unexpected conclusions and intense conflicts. She not only met the usual expectation of an interesting plot, but skyrocketed above it.
Ms. O’Connor utilized shocking endings for her stories in order to end her stories with the reader craving more. For example, in Good Country People, a fat, disabled, nihilistic woman named Hulga is seduced by a bible salesman, who then promptly steals her prosthetic leg. The whole short story revolves around how Hulga has no trust in anybody. However, when she meets the bible salesman, Manley
…show more content…
The main conflict in this short story belongs to Hulga/Joy. Her conflict focuses on herself; woman vs self. Hulga became extremely negative ever since she began requiring a prosthetic leg. The world she lives in revolves around isolation, faithlessness, and her mother infantilizing her due to her disability. Therefore, she rejects happiness, symbolized by changing her name to Hulga as opposed to keeping her previous name, Joy. She defies all religion, and purposely isolates herself from others in order to avoid more pain. Consequently, when Manley arrives, he creates a large rift inside of Hulga. She has to decide whether or not to trust him. However, she very obviously chooses to trust him. Hulga allowed him to call her by Hulga, despite being uncomfortable when Mrs. Freeman used that name for her. She felt as if her name was a personal, secret thing she did, but she trusted Manley with it. And, despite being incredibly uncomfortable with doing so, she showed him how to take off her leg as requested, showing how much trust she had in him. Then, when he stole her leg and ran off, her internal conflict grew even more. This conflict added depth to Hulga, allowing readers to better understand her as a person. Pushing the plot forward is another benefit that this conflict …show more content…
My main concern previous to this summer assignment was the level of interest I would have in the novels we read, as well as the difficulty they may contain. However, after reading, I thoroughly enjoyed the short stories and I genuinely believe that the reading level will be sufficiently difficult, yet not impossible. The amount of reading required for the summer assignment felt fairly familiar to the previous year. Nevertheless, I never had to write 5 papers in one summer. This doesn’t raise any concerns for me, however, because I did realize that AP Junior English would require more work, and I prepared myself for it. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories surpassed my expectations of good writing, and therefore I feel excited to read more in AP Junior

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Stranger Danger “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor, was published as a story in the Sewanee review in October 1954. The setting takes places after World War 2, where some refugees from the concentration camp are resettling to a farm. The literary techniques that O’Connor uses are symbolism, imagery, and irony. She uses these techniques to state her purpose about how people should not be judged for the way they are.…

    • 685 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Flannery O’Connor was a writer from the twentieth century who made her characters inflexible, ignorant, and with too much pride. She used black humor mixed with some of her religious beliefs, lots of irony, and extreme situations. She wrote two novels in her lifetime and thirty-two short stories. Her first novel was “Wise Blood’ in 1952. She was born in Savannah, Georgia to Edward F. O’Connor and Regina Cline.…

    • 1713 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Joy/Hulga begins to define herself as someone greater to others when she is announced as having the highest education out of all the characters in the short story. Joy/Hulga’s mother states: “The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy,” (__). This quotation is momentous being as the Ph.D. sets Joy/Hulga apart from everyone else in the short story due to the fact that she went through the time and effort to get the Ph.D. which sets her at a higher degree of intelligence than others. This leads Joy/Hulga to believe that she is taking advantage of Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman. When Joy/Hulga and Manley Pointer have their first kiss, Joy/Hulga believes that nothing has changed between them and that everything is “a matter of the mind’s control,” (__).…

    • 1928 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Despite her education, Joy-Hulga is extremely naïve, which is evidence that she is perhaps not as strict an adherent to her particular belief system as she had formerly thought. Her naivety is portrayed when she is on her date with Manley Porter. Because he is a “good country” person and a bible salesman, Joy-Hulga believes that he will be the naïve one, but she is sadly mistaken when he takes advantage of her, steals her leg, and leaves her to fend for herself: “She gave a cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without her leg she felt entirely dependent on him… She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends… When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake”…

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Without understanding the literary mechanics of a story, the underlying causes cannot be uncovered. Literary devices such as foreshadowing, symbolism, and irony are critical in understanding the roots of any story. These three devices are best suited to represent an important message that O’Connor intended to convey through her writing. Flannery O’Connor’s writing contains many subtle messages that are only unlocked through close study of the devices in her stories. The short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by O’Connor exemplifies the use of these three devices, and uses each element to not only contribute to the main theme, but also to bring small, individual ideas to the peripheral of the story.…

    • 1075 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Dear. Mrs. Kreider, I am so excited to be in your class this year! I have always loved to read and analyze literature, and I know this year will be no different. I have taken Pre AP or AP English every year it has been available to me, and I decided to take AP Lit to continue the same high level of English discussion and analysis I have enjoyed each year of high school. Along with expecting to delve deep into the discussion of various books, plays, and poems, I also expect that this year, in AP English 12, we will discuss the differences between last years AP Language exam and this year's AP Literature exam and get plenty of practice with both AP multiple choice and the three free response question styles.…

    • 364 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Great Essays

    Misfit Sermon Analysis

    • 1264 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The hate and bitterness of his “snarl” is the final implication as to how the Misfit feels about religion (O’Connor 645). Bellamy insists that the reason for the devilish message in the Misfit’s speech is due to his mission to play to role of the Anti-Christ. Bellamy asserts that, “The central message of the Misfit’s sermon, for a sermon is what his remarks amount to, is a familiar one in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction; there is no middle ground between absolute belief in Christ’s messianic fiction and a belief that like is nasty, brutish, and short,” (200). Katherine Feeley notes that the Misfit “embodies all reason and no faith,” which is the opposite of the faith-based personality of the grandmother (202). As Madison Jones remarks, the Misfit “may be haunted, at times tormented, by vision of Christ raising the dead, but he cannot believe it: he was not there.…

    • 1264 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Flannery O’Connor is an astounding, but strange modern American writer from Milledgeville that deepens her Christian vision throughout her works. She often engages her personal beliefs into the lives of her characters in her writings. The main characters in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, “Revelation”, and “Parker’s Back” all portray O’Connor’s belief as a Roman Catholic. All of the characters between the three stories are conceptually related and play similar roles in their particular stories. Hey Snodgrass How are you?…

    • 979 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Flannery O’Connor devoted her life to Roman Catholic and attended mass daily while growing up, which influenced her endeavor greatly. Religion is correlated with God in many cultures. Religion plays an imperative role in O’Connor’s stories to give the characters a new meaning and purpose in life through the use of religion. Flannery O’Connor portrays foreshadow, irony, symbolism, and southern religious beliefs throughout many of her stories. Alongside incorporating grace as an element, her stories are usually drawn from the people around her and various readings she had done.…

    • 1544 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    "One of her major triumphs," the narrator says, " that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga." Unlike her mother Hulga does not "hope well" because her accident, in taking away her leg, also took her faith and hope. Mrs. Hopewell's inability to see life as anything but simple also prevents her from understanding her daughter for the complex person she…

    • 455 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Flannery O’Conner resided in Milledgeville, Georgia from 1938 to 1964. Since her death, the city of Milledgeville has, like most cities, changed and adapted to fit with its worldly surroundings. Some of O’Conner’s most famous works bring forth an insight into what religion was like in Milledgeville during her time there. Her use of what readers assume to be true stories, allows the reader to experience the older culture of Milledgeville. A more recent writer, Alice Walker, also lived in the Milledgeville area, and parts of her work convey the past religious views of the Milledgeville area as well.…

    • 1598 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.” (196) Under her misconceptions about Manley, Hulga believes she can rob him of his innocence, both spiritually and physically. She hopes to destroy his good Christain worldview and replace it with her own cynical outlook on life. This highlights Hulga’s manipulative and condescending…

    • 636 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”, both elude a comparable tone and mood consistent with her usual writing style. Both of these stories fit in with the Southern Gothic genre which has a very unique feeling. This type of literature often utilizes supernatural elements and irregularity of the grotesque focusing on people from Southern United States and their innate Christianity. Southern Gothic writing holds a focus on eccentric characters as well as moody and unsettling events. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has become one of the most famous examples of this genre, holding true to its eerie feelings and dark tones.…

    • 1460 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Flannery O’Connor once said “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.” Mary Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. She was the only child. O’Connor was born in a catholic family. When she was 13, her father died of Lupus.…

    • 763 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Before arriving at college, I had always taken yearlong English classes, which had a focus on a certain topic. I’m excited to see what the papers, topics and literature had expected of me over the upcoming semester. I was always assigned what to write, how long it had to be, even how many quotations or sources I had to use, therefore having more freedom to write sounded appealing to me. The homework assignments, peer reviews, mock interviews as well as the workshops have all contributed to my semester long improvement. Over the course of the fifteen-week semester, English 101 has encouraged me to consider new literary strategies, examine new genres and study new vocabulary, all which has helped broaden my writing skills.…

    • 855 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays