Flannery O'Connor and Dragonslaying

I've been reading Flannery O'Connor's collected works. 

What a fascinating --despite her painful-freaky-thump-you-YUCKY endings-- and wonderful writer.  She hand-crafts these exquisite, insightful characterizations; she is a meticulous observer, a painter-with-words.  So observant of human nature.  Thought provoking.  Even drily hilarious. 

Her writing has that "Je ne se quois."  (That writing magic; that "I-don't-know-what-it-was-but-it-worked")

I like these stories of hers best:  "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and "Revelation."

I confess that I do sort of hate "The River," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "The Lame Shall Enter First."  Not because they're written unimpressively-- far from it; they are written so well!  But their endings are deadly and tragic. (Still, I can't get "The Lame Shall Enter First" out of my head.  If only she'd given it the happy ending that it very-almost had. 

I not only like her crazy writing, but I am developing such a liking for her as I read her letters and speeches, too.  She was very vocal about her Catholicism, her religiosity (in a mostly non-religious, or at least, mostly Protestant, academic South.)  Although I can't feel much warmth or hope in her stories, yet, I can feel a devoted, honest religiosity and a hot hatred for superficial and/or hypocritical living.  And she sees, pierces right through people who don't want to know right from wrong. 

She says things like: "Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause." (from The Fiction Writer and His Country)

She also explains her stories' (persistent!) use of violent, repugnant endings.  She says:

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.  When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then 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."(from The Fiction Writer and His Country)

She explains it another way, using a quote from St. Cyril of Jerusalem:  "The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass.  Beware lest he devour you.  We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." ...it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell..."(from The Fiction Writer and His Country)

I think she's defending her inclusion of these metaphorical dragons in her story because real life is riddled with dragons.  If the writer leaves out the dragon, for fear of frightening your reader, he/she has also lied to the reader.  I get that. 

But what I don't get, is why everybody has to get eaten by the dragon in the end.  Why aren't there a few passers-by who slay him or outwit him or tame him, in her stories?


So.  That's what I wonder about Flannery O'Connor.  So far.