Violence In Flannery O Connor's Boys And Girls

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Rocamora 1 Violence has always been prevalent throughout our history. From the first murder committed by man to the holocaust, our entire civilization has been built upon violence and so to the stories of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Laurence. In these stories violence is shown in two different ways, murder of humans and horses. After analyzing representative examples of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Boys and Girls”, I firmly maintain that violence is an integral part of both stories. O’Connor’s use of imagery and Laurence’s use of diction create two distinct characters. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” we are introduced to the misfit, an escaped murderer who later on kills the grandmother at the end of the story. In “Boys and Girls” Laurence gives us a character known as “the father”, we are not given a name but instead his behaviour throughout the story. He to commits wrongly actions in murdering not only injured horses but healthy ones too. “The girl is not surprised to later learn that her father has recaptured and killed the mare” (Korb). As we can see we have a similarity between both characters, the misfit and the father commit murders. In a typical story the reader is always going to be given a climax. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the climax of the story is of course at the end, when the Misfit…show more content…
In O’Connor’s story the grandmother is trying to make peace with the misfit with the grace of God. “The Misfit has an opportunity to accept grace but recoils in horror at the Grandmother’s gesture” (Piedmont-Marton). In Laurence’s story the mother is constantly trying to get her daughter to be more of a “girl” instead of working with the father on the farm, “For years she has helped out her father, but that winter she realizes that her mother is expecting her to become more of a “girl” — working in the house, for instance, instead of in the fox

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