I'll say Flannery O'Connor. Ultimately, it is only she
who controls the LACK OF MORALITY in her fiction. She would not want us to choose
either the Misfit or the grandmother since all her characters are
doomed.
O'Connor once
said:
This is
a generation of wingless chickens, which is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was
dead.
Her comic religious
vision holds that a morally and socially degenerate (The Misfit) is nonetheless
spiritually a cut above the wingless chickens of privileged Christianity (the
grandmother and her family). She shocks her readers by beginning with divine evil as a
backdoor to what is divine good so that they may rediscover what is holy.
Her goal, I think, is to prevent her readers from taking sides among her
religious forms; instead, she calls for action--from them
to be
seekers instead of
being
found.
When reading O'Connor's prose one
can feel the laws of attraction at work: good begets good; evil begets evil. Syntheses
and concessions are pitfalls. Either one is Christ-centered or hell-bent toward the
fumes of the gas chamber. Her poles are distinct and opposing, the slippery slope a
descent to hell.
So, you really can't judge any of her
characters morally. They are all morally irresponsible and, therefore, fated and
doomed. Like Kafka's, O'Connor's characters are caricatures, flat, static, submen as
they populate a fallen, Christ-haunted world.
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