I'm planning on reading (or re-reading) the following short stories and was hoping some folks out there might want to participate in a discussion.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor
A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner
The Happy Memories Club by Lee Smith

These stories should be in just about any anthology of American Literature. I'm teaching a Lit course this semester and working up some notes anyway. All three of these stories are fabulous/

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/goodman.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... decfic.htm

I'll read them with you Geo. Thanks for posting the links. I've never heard of Lee Smith, so I'm excited to read that one. I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts on these stories. Nice choices!

Thanks, Suzanne. I've read all three stories and I'll post a few comments tomorrow. I forgot how freakin' awesome A Rose For Emily is. Or maybe I just didn't appreciate it as much when I was younger.

Looks good to me ... nice to be able to get the stories right off the web, quick and cheap. With all this natural disaster stuff happening, good timing to read short stories and think about something besides hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and earthquakes. And good to see some activity on the short story thread too.

geo wrote:I'm planning on reading (or re-reading) the following short stories and was hoping some folks out there might want to participate in a discussion.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor
A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner
The Happy Memories Club by Lee Smith

These stories should be in just about any anthology of American Literature. I'm teaching a Lit course this semester and working up some notes anyway. All three of these stories are fabulous/

I just read O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." I did not like it and I do not think I like O'Connor much. On the other hand, I love Lee Smith and William Faulkner. The Happy Memories Club is not one I've read. If I can get my hands on it, I'll read it.

Saffron wrote:
I just read O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." I did not like it and I do not think I like O'Connor much. On the other hand, I love Lee Smith and William Faulkner. The Happy Memories Club is not one I've read. If I can get my hands on it, I'll read it.

Hey, Saffron. So what about the story didn't you like? Was the violence too much?

My perspective is that this story works really well and on different levels. It reads almost like a 50s pulp fiction horror story – very tight and well-plotted, but there's enough going on beneath the surface that allows for different interpretations. It dives right into the action, grabs you right away, and adds just enough suspense and foreshadowing along the way to keep you interested and guessing what's going to happen. The Misfit is mentioned in the first paragraph and in the first dialogue, and again when the family is at the restaurant. So we get a sense that the Misfit will play a role in this story. The Grandmother is not a very sympathetic character and we don't really know much about the other characters, some of who are unnamed—the mother, the baby. O'Connor keeps an ironic distance from the characters which is perhaps why the violent end doesn't bother us too much. The story is darkly humorous.

It's interesting to note that Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic and she has said in interviews and in her writing that much of the purpose of her fiction is to enlighten her readers of certain religious truths. Her work grapples with "living a spiritual life in a secular world." Man is fallen and can only be redeemed through God’s grace. To some extent, she's proselytizing.

From "A Study of Flannery O'Connor" in the Bedford Introduction to Literature:

"O'Connor used "violent means" to convey her vision to a "hostile audience." "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs that you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it." But when the audience holds different values, "you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

Knowing that O'Connor probably included most of her readers among the damned, I still think we can enjoy a superbly well-told tale. It's telling to see what the Grandmother considers are qualities that make a "good" person. The Grandmother is religious only in a superficial way and comes out as a hypocrite. The larger question of this story centers around whether the Grandmother is redeemed at the end. What is the significance of her telling the Misfit: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children"? Is she reaching out to another human being? Does she feel a connection to the Misfit? Or is she just trying to save her own butt?

Definitions of Southern Gothic

- Characters portrayed in a modern, realistic, grim, gritty, disturbing, often shocking manner.
- “The Grotesque”: flawed, damaged, often dangerous characters; unpleasant cringe-inducing qualities.
- Southern culture at its worst (racial bigotry, self-righteousness, religious obsession and extremes; cruelty and violence, suicide and mental illness, overall cultural decay).
- Tennessee Williams: “Southern Gothic is about an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.”

Contrast with a description of the ghost story by Jack Sullivan: The ghost story always assumes a rational and morally-ordered world, but then “begins to worry about that assumption when something inexplicably threatening creeps in.”

Saffron, I agree with you somewhat, it was not a very likable story, but it was interesting and different. Gritty. I enjoyed it just on that level and t was interesting that there was not really a single character who you could really warm up to.

Thank, Geo, for your comentary. I wondered about the author and the underlying religious message. I got the feeling that the Grandmother was very superficially religious, very self-centered, and in the end was trying to save herself, except for the fleeting little hint that there could have been a little bit more to it. I think that is part of the appeal, that small uncertainty of the message.

I just read what I wrote, about not really being able to warm up to any character, but that is not completely true. I think there was a part of me that admired the old grandma. She had determination and spunk.

O'Connor takes some pains to paint the Grandmother as petty and and manipulative. She's not above lying to family members to get her way. It starts with with her secretly taking the cat--Petty Sing--on the car trip against her son's wishes. She makes up the story about the secret panel in order to get to see the house of her former beau (before realizing that she's in the wrong state). And, finally, when they meet the MisFit, she shouts out, "I know who you are, you're the MisFit," thus sealing the family's doom.

There's another scene where she sees a black child in the doorway of a shack and says, "Oh look at the cute little pickaninny! . . . If I could paint I would paint that picture." She doesn't care to remark on the child's condition of abject poverty, only that it makes a "nice" picture.

But the Grandmother does have some positive traits, as Realiz says. She tries to teach the kids some manners and appreciation for the countryside. She gives the Baby some attention on the car ride. We can appreciate her complete lack of independence. She has to live with her son and his family, has no house of her own. Presumably she can't drive. She's about on par with the kids in terms of how much control she has in her life.