Catholic Information Center

Large and Startling Figures Flannery O’Connor’s Postmodern Apologetic with Dr. Frederick C. Bauerschmidt Writing to a friend in the mid-1950s, the American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor noted that we live in an age in which “the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them….This is a Generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.” In such a situation, she felt, subtlety could not work: “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.” Dr. Bauerschmidt explores how, through her fiction, O’Conner presented her Catholic vision by means of grotesque and often shockingly violent tales in which the absolute demands of belief clash with postmodern indifference, attempting to open jaded modern readers to the possibility of transcendent truth.