Parker's Back by Flannery O'Connor

To the uninitiated, the significance of Flannery O'Connor's Parker's Back can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to …

…willing to go to draconian lengths to mete out her particular brand of divine grace, utilizing such techniques as matricide, strangulation, suicide, impaling, beating, shooting, and whipping, to name a few. Works Cited Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, p. 105. Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 114. Gilbert H. Muller, Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque, p. 5. O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 91.