ABSTRACT
Waugh seems almost benevolent when set beside Flannery O'Connor. Christ has already come to plead for sinners; next time it will be to judge and O'Connor's pages anticipate that second coming. Nowhere is the ethic of the Inferno more vividly dramatized than in O'Connor's fiction. People do learn in O'Connor's school, but there was never an academy with higher tuition fees, as the central character in 'Greenleaf' would surely agree, could she speak from the grave. All of O'Connor's work is a deliberate affront to the modern world, but it is in her 'happy' stories that she is especially offensive. The Misfit meets O'Connor's stipulation, albeit in a terrifyingly negative sense. O'Connor undeniably presents the drowning as a happy event, even if the modern world, with Mr Paradise acting as its spokesman, responds with angry incomprehension to what it can only understand as obscurantist nonsense.
