She was a devout Roman Catholic living in predominantly Protestant rural Georgia. Her stories are far from pious; in fact, their mode is usually shocking and often bizarre. Yet the religious issues they raise are central to her work. As Robert Fitzgerald expresses it, "she kept going deeper . . . until making up stories became, for her, a way of testing and defining and conveying that superior knowledge that must be called religious."
O'Connor's fictional world as a Catholic writer is one founded on three basic theological truths: "the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment." But the "modern secular world," as she was accustomed to call it, is either unprepared or unwilling to accept that vision. The would-be existentialist prophet in Wise Blood, Hazel Motes, in preaching his "Church Without Christ," puts it this way: "I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two." "[The Catholic fiction writer] may have to resort," O'Connor believed, "to violent literary means to get his vision across to a hostile audience." The literary genre she chose was the grotesque— "grotesque with good reason," she would claim— because "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Because her talent was so great, her life seemed tragically short.
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