The Symbiotic Relationship of Violence and Grace “Extending reality outward until it embraced religious mystery,” says Gilbert H. Muller (56), is something that Flannery O’Connor did with extraordinary finesse. The mystery of grace captivated her and she used violence to shock both her characters and readers into making a decision about grace. O’Connor used “violence to illustrate the pointlessness of a purely secular world and the indispensable need of God to correct the absurdity …showed first 75 words of 1502 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1502 total…I. Books Fitzgerald, Robert and Sally, O’Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, c. 1969 Grimshaw Jr., James A., The Flannery O’Connor Companion, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, c. 1981 Muller, Gilbert H., Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque, University of Georgia Press, Athens, c. 1972 Orvell, Miles, Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London, c. 1991 Walters, Dorothy, Flannery O’Connor, Twayne Publishers, Boston, c. 1973