Flannery O’Connor’s works are some of the best examples of darkly comic writing, full of unexpected twists. In her short stories, as well as in all of her works, O’Connor uses a multitude of various literary devices. This essay will discuss the usage of figurative and sensory language in her two famous short stories: A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Good Country People. There are many ways in which O’Connor uses figurative language, and the types most common for all her stories are simile, verbal and dramatic irony, and symbolism.
Simile is frequently used in O’Connor’s stories: in most cases, she uses it to describe some traits that her characters have. At the beginning of A Good Man Is Hard To Find, for instance, simile allows the author to convey a sense of eccentric light-heartedness and gives the story its comic effect. Good examples of this are the descriptions of the grandmother’s bag: “big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner”, and the mother’s face: “as broad and innocent as a cabbage” (O’Connor 471). As the plot begins to unveil its darker side, however, similes begin to be used as the means to show the other side of the characters. For example, when O’Connor writes about the grandmother’s family being killed by The Misfit’s men, she describes the grandmother’s reaction as “raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water” (O’Connor 480). This description does not make the reader sympathetic to the grandmother, but almost annoyed with her dramatic, disingenuous shrieking.
Many examples of verbal and dramatic irony can be found in this story as well, and one of them is seen in the announcement that June Star makes after the car accident. “But nobody’s killed!” she cries in disappointment, and, ironically enough, her expectations are met in the end of the story. The dramatic irony is presented through the interaction between the family and The Misfit. While the grandmother seems most concerned and afraid of him from the beginning of the story, she is also the one who gets the whole family killed. She states she would never take her children “in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it” (O’Connor 470). However, she keeps insisting on them going to the desolate place which is not even the place she wanted to see.
Good Country People is the story full of irony as well. The name of the story itself is ironic, because it refers to how wrong and deluded the main characters are about their idea of “good country people” they claim to admire. The main plot twist reveals this implementation of irony as well, because the Bible Salesman turns out to be a conman and tricks everyone in the end. However, the biggest example of irony in Good Country People is the storyline of Hulga. Being an arrogant woman, she thinks and acts like she is better that anyone around her, but eventually falls victim to an average fraud. She claims to have a “weak heart”, meaning the problems with her physical health, but she also has a “weak” heart, or a weak spirit, in terms of being compassionate and caring for other people.
There are many symbols that describe the characters’ personalities in Good Country People. The Bible that Manley Pointer carries with him acts as a symbol of his hollow and lying nature. The fact that he hides liquor in the Bibles shows that he does not believe in or care about anything, except getting drunk and stealing from people. Another symbol is the change of the Joy’s name to Hulga; this symbolizes the way she sees herself, because she feels ugly and thinks that Hulga is a proper name for a person like her.
References to vision and other senses add significantly to all the figurative language devices used in the stories, making the descriptions of events and characters’ appearance more vivid to the reader. O’Connor seems to refer to vision more often than to other senses. For example, describing Red Sammy, she depicts “his khaki trousers reaching just to his hip bones and his stomach hanging over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt” (O’Connor 474). Another example is a reference to hearing, when the grandmother is left alone with The Misfit: “she found herself saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing” (O’Connor 480). Descriptions like this allow the readers to visualise the scenes and the characters’ behaviors better.
It is hard to say if senses are trustworthy, as different people experience such impressions in a different way. However, using and referring to them certainly makes the readers more engaged in the narration and affects other elements of the stories. Portraying physical world through the imagery contributes to the creation of a certain course of events and the specific ways the characters act. For example, O’Connor describes the road that Bailey’s car turned to as a hilly dirt road with “sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments”. This description already makes the reader uncomfortable, foreshadowing some unfortunate turn of events.
The examples presented above are only some of the many ways in which O’Connor makes emotional connections to engage the reader. However, even these few examples can show how masterfully she uses figurative language and references to vision. Most common literary devices in her stories are simile, symbolism, verbal and dramatic irony. All these devices make her writing expressive and engaging, helping to create that exceptional tragically comic effect, characteristic of her works.