ABSTRACT
Since the times of her youth, Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) showed a special talent for satirizing the world around her. When she was studying at the Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University – Milledgeville, Georgia), she started carving and publishing both linoleum engravings and drawings. The scenes can be divided into four different groups (life at college, World War II and the Waves, social life and caricatures). Years later, when she abandoned her career as a graphic artist and a journalist to become a writer, Miss O’Connor translated her “pictoric” techniques to her writings. The corpus of her short stories (mainly in the collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)) is a good example of how Flannery O’Connor deciphered into words the caricatures she once drew. The descriptions of some characters and situations make a master of the (literary) caricatures. The goal of this chapter is to study how caricaturesque characters and situations were portrayed by O’Connor following similar patterns to those she had learned years earlier.
