Grace and Sin in Flannery O'Connor

Virtually all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories contain the receiving of grace by an unworthy protagonist at the tale's climatic moment. The hero of "Parker's Back" gets a Catholic, Byzantine tattoo of Christ on his back to please (unsuccessfully) his fundamentalist Protestant wife. The grandmother of "A Good Man is Hard to find" sees the face of the divine in the escaped convict known only as the 'misfit.' Even in the hearts of the most sinful of O'Connor's characters, it is possible for human beings, the author suggests, to receive grace. Grace comes unexpectedly to these characters, as it does to all human beings in O'Connor's theological understanding of the world, but it does come, blessedly and however briefly, and the human heart is changed for the better as a result.

According to the Flannery O'Connor scholar Karen Bernardo, "all of O'Connor's stories deal...
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