Flannery O’Connor and Fate: an Open Letter

[Michael]

Dear R _______,

I’m sitting here in my dorm catching up on some work I have due for a few classes. This semester has been going well so far; I’m taking a few interesting cinema courses. (Sometimes I feel like the film theory I’m assigned to read for class can be a bit dense, but that’s a topic for another time.) I just finished reading a few Flannery O’Connor short stories (“A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”), and they seem to be infiltrating my thoughts no matter what work I decide to do. Spanish? O’Connor. Film history? O’Connor. They’re very profound stories, but I just can’t seem to figure out why they’re affecting me so much.

Maybe I’m relating to their unrelenting negativity, something that is hard to escape as a college student. Maybe O’Connor’s relatively straightforward writing style contrasts so deeply with these sweeping themes of life and death and unprovoked viciousness that my brain is having a difficult time sorting through the stories’ messages. I’m not sure. To clarify, I’m not saying this in the hopes that someone knows definitively what is so powerful about O’Connor’s writing. Rather, I’m writing this letter to express my awe at literature’s capacity for bewilderment.

I remember reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” for the first time in a writing class my dad taught my friends and I back when I was probably thirteen or fourteen. I was homeschooled. “Why,” he presumably asked, “does the Misfit kill the family in the story?” Being thirteen or fourteen, I probably didn’t have a good answer. But even now, I still don’t have a good answer. Is he simply insane? Is the grandmother’s character really that exasperating? I don’t think there is a good answer. Rather, I have come to believe, these stories are meant to highlight the unpredictability of life and wickedness. The family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” didn’t deserve to die, but fate presented them with a violent, inescapable twist. That seems to be the point of the story. There doesn’t need to be a reason for death or negativity.

The same question my dad asked about “A Good Man is Hard to Find” could also be asked similarly about “Good Country People.” Why does Manley Pointer take Joy Hopewell’s prosthetic leg? She didn’t deserve to be maltreated, but she was. There is no good reason for why it happened. But the lack of reason is the main driving force of these stories. Life, in a broad sense, is unpredictable, unforgiving, and erratic. Happiness can be succeeded by sadness at any moment. That is why I am writing this letter. These stories are clear indicators of something that is impossible to completely comprehend, and I have been confounded by their subtle intensities. Maybe living in a big city makes these stories even more profound, since you can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about some senseless, tragic crime that has no clear motive. Our city is O’Connor’s dirt road in Georgia. That family fell victim to fate just as indiscriminately as anyone living in this large and foreboding city could become a casualty of randomness.

I guess I’ll get back to studying now, and hopefully I’ve removed some of the philosophical weight of O’Connor’s stories by writing this letter. It was getting hard to do homework with all of those thoughts of the fleeting nature of life and the randomness of fate!

- Michael

[Patricia]

Michael, I am a thousand years older than you are, and I don't get O'Connor either. I read for information, to be inspired or touched, or to understand other people and cultures. Reading O'Connor is depressing. She doesn't seem to really like the human race and only sees the evil side. I don't want to read literature that nurtures despair. There's enough of that on the newscasts.

[Fictional]

Dear Michael, I am only a little more than three and not yet near four times older than you are, but I'll say first that you write very eloquently about the apparent paradox of life that O'Connor sets before us all. If I had to guess, I'd say she believes that people need to understand that we are all of our behaviors, not just the good ones and the ones that make sense, but the heinous ones as well. Our world, the human world that we wake up and make every day, is a world of wildly divergent behaviors. Some of us walk around with coding that says "be good whenever you can" and others have code that says "do things, because you have two hands and two legs and you can."

One reason to read is that some writers are just brilliant story-tellers and it is a pure joy to read what they have concocted from an alphabet that would have otherwise just been there doing nothing. O'Connor is one of the best. If she makes you think, then your brain is doing the primary thing it was intended to do and you should celebrate.

Honestly, though, I think you've answered you own question quite well. You had questions, you wrote about them and, in the process, I bet you discovered some stuff about yourself, about O'Connor, and about life. Good job! Keep it up!