Saturday, August 08, 2015

Jesus seen aslant …

… Beyond Eastrod: "Jesus thrown everything off balance" -- Beyond Eastrod, Flannery O'Connor, and a provocative story that has changed my life and doomed me to despair and damnation.

If one posits that The Misfit represents Satan, fallen angel, then both the strange allure of what he says and the evident madness of it, the alternating current of pride and despair, I think, becomes manifest, and that, I think, is what O'Connor was driving at.

4 comments:

  1. Yes, Frank, I think O'Connor wholeheartedly believed in the existence of Satan/Devil/Evil just as she had no doubts about the existence of Father/Son/Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I'm not sure her characters can be reduced to mere symbolic stand-ins for those entities, and I do not think that is what you intend by your statement. Her stance on symbolism can be represented by the anecdote of when a reader asked about the symbolism of The Misfit's hat and when O'Connor responded that it was simply a hat worn by The Misfit.

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  2. Yeah, I felt a little uneasy that what I said could be seen as reductionism, which would be a grave disservice to O'Connor and literature. But reading that quote just made think of how bizarrely evil The Misfit is.

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    1. Is he evil (immoral) or indifferent to good (amoral), which means the Christian options are irrelevant to him? I think his choices are less important than the grandmother's.

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  3. Yes, the grandmother's choices are definitely more important than his. Amoral is a possibility, but evil, in the demonic way I suggested earlier, seems richer.

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