Flannery O’Connor

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures. — Flannery O'Connor

Mention to students that Flannery O'Connor's fiction often is labeled as "Southern Gothic" or "Southern Grotesque." Responding to this genre designation, O'Connor's once said that, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic" (40).

Point out that O'Connor also is considered a humorous writer. Literary critic Mark Steadman of Clemson University (SC) notes that, "Southern humor, like much of the best southern writing in general, has been boisterous and physical, often grotesque, and generally realistic" [From EDSITEment-reviewed Documenting the American South's 'Humor in Literature.'] Leading a discussion on the "binary," or convergence, of O'Connor's humor v. "the grotesque, ask students the following questions:

 How would you define the words "gothic" and "grotesque"?  What does O'Connor mean by "grotesque"?  What elements of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" would you describe as "grotesque"?  What elements of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" would you describe as humorous?  What are the effects of O'Connor's being both humorous and grotesque in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"?