The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2013
National Book Award

According to the Wikipedia page for one of the stories in this collection, 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."

The collection contains stories about a family getting murdered by a serial killer, a 5-year-old who drowns himself, a father who so neglects his son that the child hangs himself, a one-armed man who abandons a mute girl at a diner, and many more. It's not hard to see why most would categorize them as "hard, hopeless, and brutal."

"Grace" is a difficult theological concept as it is (as defined by the Catholic Church), "free and undeserved." It's easy to feel that the central characters in O'Connor's stories are "undeserved." They are frequently short-sighted and act against themselves and their best interests, usually with tragic results.

O'Connor generally does not portray the artists in her stories favorably. In modern America, we often value the independent mind and spirit, the iconoclast, the maverick. O'Connor does not share this view. One example is "The Partridge Festival," where a young would-be writer returns to the hometown he disdains out of a fascination with a spree killer, who he sees as "a man who would not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors." But when he meets the man, he finds a lunatic. He runs from his true calling, sales:

Selling was the only thing he had proved himself good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.

It's hard not to wonder how O'Connor felt about her own vocation, especially considering how laborious she found the writing process, as described by editor Robert Giroux in the introduction. Did she forsake some more natural grace? Or did she feel she was doing God's will with her writing? Maybe she was uncertain - one memorable story, "Parker's Back" tells of a man who is inspired to impress his very Christian wife by getting a large tattoo of Jesus on his back, only to have her throw him out of the house for idolatry. This is not an easy set of stories to read, and it sounds like it was equally difficult for O'Connor to write.