Mark O'Connor

The Landlady’s Theme The short story, “The Landlady”, by Roald Dahl, is a very scary tale. It uses events with a certain theme in mind which is things are not always as they seem. In the story, Billy thinks the Landlady as a nice friendly old lady with “a round pink face and very gentle blue eyes,” but he soon finds out that she is not at all that nice. The Landlady only shows Billy what she wants him to see, and hides her true personality, a psychopath lady with an “unusual” hobby. A short…

The most devastating consequence of one character's selfishness is the destruction of an entire family. Such is the case in Flannery O'Connor’s "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The grandmother in this work of literature has an unbending desire to force her entire family to change prearranged vacation plans and visit east Tennessee instead of Florida. Her egocentric decisions result in her family's death. During the road trip, she successfully manipulates her grandchildren, they aggravate her son…

Flannery O’Connor lived a short thirty-nine years and during that time published thirty-one stories and two novels, in addition to multiple reviews and essays. Despite her short ourve, O’Connor aimed to illuminate an impactful, didactic message in each of her stories, exposing truths behind the superficialities of dialogue and self-image. To achieve that message, most of her stories share a glaring continuity: They take place in the American South. O’Connor uses the culture of the American South…

In her collection of short stories, Flannery O’Connor has a characteristic style that is shown through her narrator and figurative language regardless of the plot or scenario. In the first four novella in the collection, O’Connor introduces the reader to these aspects of her style via similar uses and different elements according to each story she tells. Her novellas have a characteristic style through color imagery, a mean-spirited (but humorous) storyteller as the narrator, strange comparisons…

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor shows a family vacation that quickly turns into a violent end by a criminal known as “the Misfit.” The author is known for her religious symbolism and the violence of life. O’Connor’s settings are most often in the American South. In fact, the story, most characters are Southerner. The central confrontation between the grandmother and The Misfit revolves around Jesus. The question is how God’s grace is involved with the Grandmother and the Misfit…

A Good Man Is Hard to Find People always say one thing but often means another. Irony is the figure of speech of words that are used in a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the word (Bavota). Flannery O’Conner was born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She moved to Milledgeville, Georgia with her mother soon after her father died of the hereditary disease lupus. O’Conner graduated from Georgia State College for Women. She got her masters from the…

“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, is a prime example postmodernism. Perhaps the most notable characteristic of postmodernism in this piece is abandonment of the “right” moral code or the “truth”. Postmodern writers often wrote about many truths, rather than one universal “truth” that had been practiced before. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother has her own definition of what is “good”, which is based on appearances and stereotypes, and is likely consistent with…

“The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.” Exerpt said by American author Paul Auster. Flannery O’Connor’s short stories establish how the theme of control over powers one's thoughts and actions. Throughout O’Connor’s stories, characters often possess a moment of grace which the author defines as: “In [O’Connor’s]…

To Ms. Hymowitz, Hello Ms. Kay S. Hymowitz, I’m writing this letter to you to talk about the recent writing that you have worked on, Where Have All The Good Men Gone. First off, I congratulate you on the great work that you have done. Your writing is very strong, and although you have great evidence to support your claim on how these generations of men are continuously living in pre-adulthood, I believe that you should also take in consideration that not all good men are completely gone. A…

The plots in both “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are driven more by chance, coincidence and irony than by character. From chance encounters to ironic deaths, each story bounces from one irony and coincidence to the next, until it is clear that their authors started with the seed of these coincidental events, and then grew their stories around them. In “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” the protagonist Mcrae has a chance meeting with a young girl that goes by the…