SOURCE: Kinney, Arthur F. “Flannery O'Connor and the Fiction of Grace.” Massachusetts Review 27, no. 1 (spring 1986): 71-96.

In the following essay, Kinney considers the role of grace in O'Connor's fiction.

Flannery O'Connor claimed always to be writing fiction about the extraordinary moments of God's grace, when it touches even the most maimed, deformed, or unregenerate of people—especially those; proper Christian literature, she remarked, is always “an invitation to deeper and stranger visions.” Yet however willingly the most devoted and admiring reader might listen to her talk about her art, precisely those extraordinary moments have always been, at the least, troubling. Even Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk for whom she sustained great respect and whose books she bought and read, had his difficulties. He could say of one of her finest stories, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” that her fiction often seemed to him “strangely scrambled.”

The good people...