Flannery O’Connor and the Coen Brothers

The mixture of violence with comedy in Flannery O’Connor’s stories offers up an absurd exaggeration of the ordinary. The Coen brothers must be fans, and Flannery a precursor to their film style. Flannery’s ritual, taken from the church and put out on the street, in the fields, or confined to crowded houses, yet still proudly clad in the absurd array of ecclesiastical colors, seems to undermine any serious attempt at self-discovery, yet speaks to where we come from, who we are, where we might be going, and who might be watching.