SOURCE: Zornado, Joseph. “A Becoming Habit: Flannery O'Connor's Fiction of Unknowing.” Religion and Literature 29, no. 2 (summer 1997): 27-59.

In the following essay, Zornado considers the relationship between O'Connor's Catholic faith and her fiction by focusing on the depiction of baptism in her story “The River” and her novel The Violent Bear It Away.

Its almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively.

—Flannery O'Connor, Habit 144

Much of Flannery O'Connor's fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility. In fact, O'Connor's fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and invisible in the manners. O'Connor remains remarkable as an avowed Catholic and as a writer because she resisted spelling out that mystery though her Catholic...