Flannery O'Connor's revelation: reality through the lens of the grotesque

• Autor(a) principal: Dantas, Rafael Linhares
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRN
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/handle/123456789/48647
• topic: Grotesco; Grotesque; Revelação; "Revelation"; O'Connor, Flannery, 1925-1964.; Suffering.; Sofrimento; Redenção; Redemption

The theory of the grotesque and its connection with Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has been discussed among literary studies for a long time, mainly her most famous short narratives such as "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", "Good Country People", and the one analyzed in this monograph, "Revelation", which is one of her final stories. Many comparisons and connections have been made between both the Grotesque and "Revelation", but not in analogy to Edwards and Graulund’s Grotesque, and not analyzing how the story’s main character is the heart of the characterization in the narrative. Ergo, this work has as its main objectives to investigate the main characters and the three distinct settings of the short story, according to Edwards and Graulund’s theory, along with O’Connor’s religious beliefs and her book of essays Mystery and Manners, which will be used in order to see if the main character’s physical and psychological suffering is connected to the grotesque elements of the story. Gathering all this information and analyzing the narrative accordingly we were able to comprehend that grotesque elements such as animalistic view and verbal violence are O’Connor’s representation of reality according to her social and cultural contexts, and the main character’s physical and psychological suffering as means to achieve a foresight, representing a portrayal of what the author trusted to be the real meaning of redemption by God.