Good Country People Literary Analysis Essay

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Alec Medina Jordan Collier LIT2020-0005 19 April 2015 “Good Country People”: The Epitome of the Anarchistic Writing of Flannery O’ Connor Flannery O’Connor is a zealous Roman Catholic of southern descent, who writes in a radically different fashion than her equivalents of the time, focusing entirely on controversial issues of morality rather than racial discrimination. She ventures through the moral uncertainty of all human beings in demonstrating the moral ambiguity of characters in “Good Country People,” published in her 1955 collection A Good Man is Hard to Find. O’Connor seems to imply that every human being, like her characters, is a composition of both good and evil. However, she does not attempt to sermonize any messages related to her own faith or about how to ultimately achieve perfection. On the contrary, throughout her story, she criticizes every character from the bible lovers, to the pretentious cerebral atheists. Flannery O'Connor utilizes characterization, symbolism, and irony in "Good Country People" to warn people with an anarchic philosophy of life that their beliefs will inevitably put them on the path to their own…show more content…
The irony of Hulga's claim that she is a nihilist is exposed as she realizes how evil it is. She embraces Manley and "kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him". Since she has never been kissed or experienced true intimacy it is logical that she does of believe in anything and trusts Pointer. Manley asks for what he believes is Hulga's most important feature, her leg. She treats this moment as an act of submission and it touched by it. She describes the experience as "losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.” He then quotes Jesus through Mark's words saying, "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it". His beliefs have evidently changed

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