O'Connor and Moral Judgments

Flannery O'Connor spoke and wrote at some length of how her stories exemplified her conservative Catholic perspective, with their focus on such unfashionable themes as evil, grace, and free will at a time when, in her view, fiction was expected to be nonjudgmental and to consider how its subjects were constrained by personality or society. One of the key statements in her "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" is "It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion . . . Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded by the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything. Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way, the intellectual and moral judgments in it will have the ascendancy over feeling."

1) The liberal Episcopalian Philip K. Dick was a very different breed of Christian; but he was very serious about his Christianity. How do the ideas of evil, grace, and moral judgment show up in Dr. Bloodmoney or in Dick's late discussion of it?

2) How do those moral judgments and suspicion of compassion work out in "Good Country People"? Whom does the story judge and why? What attitude do you feel the story takes?

3) Do you get an idea, from the essay and story, of what O'Connor wants to use disability in fiction for? Do you see any connection with that and the fact that she was herself disabled?