"Extending reality outward until it embraced religious mystery," says Gilbert H. Muller (56), is something that Flannery O'Connor did with extraordinary finesse. The mystery of grace captivated her and she used violence to shock both her characters and readers into making a decision about grace. O'Connor used "violence to illustrate the pointlessness of a purely secular world and the indispensable need of God to correct the absurdity of man's condition. Violence permits the individual to undergo remarkable transformations (Muller 93)," which we see very clearly in her writings. In each work, the violence of love is synonymous with faith and it becomes clear that it is God's love, which allows grace to enter in.

The purpose of violence throughout O'Connor's stories is not obvious to the naked eye; you have to delve deeper in order to see more than just the entertaining story, to see the truth behind the fiction. As James Grimshaw states, "grotesqueness and violence lead inevitably to an opportunity for revelation and Grace (37)," and so it is for the main characters in Greenleaf, Everything that Rises must Converge, and Revelation. In Greenleaf, Mrs. May's hideousness is r

Muller, Gilbert H., Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque, University of Georgia Press, Athens, c. 1972

"Violence is strangely capable of returning humans to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. By nature, however, we resist grace because as O'Connor says, grace changes us and the change is painful. Though human kind may resist, it cannot run from the fact that grace is constantly present in our lives. Flannery O'Connor believed that our lives were slow and sometimes-painful progressions along individual spiritual journeys, and that each bit of grace we received helped us to grow in our spirituality and prepared us for what may lay ahead. In short, O'Connor summed up our lives in the phrase "grace under construction."

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Approximate Word count = 1524
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)