Flannery O'Connor's story "Greenleaf," which won first place in the O'Henry Awards in 1956, involves violence that is kept plausible but that also strives for effects beyond the scope of plausibility. It provides a useful litmus test by which to measure the anti-humanistic venom in O'Connor's fiction and her manner of verbally shutting readers out and shaking them violently off the track. The story structurally resembles the overly annotated "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Both begin with domestic squabbles and the wry comedy of having various characters colliding with, baiting, and annoying each other. Both end with startlingly violent events that depend upon the comedy of manners preceding them for their darkened affective power, and both also end with female characters who may experience some kind of revelation in their moment of death.
n "Greenleaf" many of the premonitory verbal gestures that precede Mrs. May's being gored by a scrub bull are recognized as foreshadowings only when the story is reread. Nothing reasonably ensures that a reader will remember Mrs. Greenleaf's previous cry, "Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!" (O'Conner, 1988), at the climax of the story or Mrs. May's wish to tell her seemingly heartless and needling sons that "you'll find out one of these days, you'll find out what Reality is when it's too late!" (O'Conner, 1988). In fact, these seem like just the kind of details an earnest English teacher might be proud to point out to inattentive students. According the story that kind of coherence means ignoring other of its elements that compromise the convenience of such cross referenced thematic parallelism.
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