"On Her Own Work"
By Flannery O'Connor
A story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hands on and
expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it's equally true that to analyze with any
discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story
read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment. I don't have any pretensions to being an
Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience out of your
mythic background, though this story I'm going to read certainly calls up a good deal of the
South's mythic background, and it should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though
its way of being serious is a comic one. I do think, though, that like the Greeks you should know
what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred
from its surface to its interior.
I would be most happy if you had already read it, happier still if you knew it well, but since
experience has taught me to keep my expectations along these lines modest, I'll tell you that this
is the story of a family of six which on its way driving to Florida, gets wiped out by an escaped
convict who calls himself the Misfit. The family if made up of the Grandmother and her son,
Bailey, and his children, John Wesley and June Star and the baby, and there is also the cat and
the children's mother. The cat is named Pitty Sing, and the Grandmother is taking him with them,
hidden in a basket.
Now I think it behooves me to try to establish with you the basis on which reason operates in this
story. Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though
the reasonableness of my use of it many not always be apparent. The assumptions that underlie
this use of it, however, are those of the central Christian mysteries. These are assumptions to
which a large part of the modern audience takes exception. About this I can only say that there
are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none other by which it
could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception
operate.
The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the
Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well
prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely.
I've talked to a number of teachers who use this story in class and who tell their students that the
Grandmother is evil, that in fact, she's a witch, even down to the cat. One of these teachers told
me that his students, and particularly his Southern students, resisted this interpretation with a
certain bemused vigor, and he didn't understand why. I had to tell him that they resisted it
because they all had grandmothers or great-aunts just like her at home, and they knew, from
personal experience, that the old lady lacked comprehension, but that she had a good heart. The
Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence, and he knows
that a taste for self-preservation can be readily combined with the missionary spirit. The same
teacher was telling his students that morally the Misfit was several cuts above the Grandmother.
He had a really sentimental attachment to the Misfit. But then a prophet gone wrong is almost
