Violence and coping in Flannery O'Connor, Breece Pancake, and a third author

Dystopia

Discussion on Perspectives of Violence Based on Three Readings

Violence and tragedy are a fact of life that the human condition has yet to rid itself off. Misfortune can come from many sources. It can come from within a person, from within a family, or from within a community. It is the way people explain and come to terms with such events that define the life that persists afterwards. In the three stories selected, violence is portrayed in each. However, the source of the violence is attributed to different causes. It is a natural human response to try to make sense of tragic events and people do this in different ways. In this analysis, three stories will be used to compare and contrast how some individuals cope, or fail to cope, with violence or misfortune. Each story provides a different perspective on this issue.

Flannery O'Conner

Flannery O'Conner was a controversial figure in her contemporary period. She perplexed and alienated some of her readers by being perceived as un-Christina or even anti-Christian in her philosophy. She believed in a spiritual world however she did not believe in free will, at least not in the common notion. Instead she believed that there were several wills that could be chosen from. However, she claims to be a devote Christian and part of the mystery that lies in her writings deals with the "mysteries" involved with Christ. In the Wise Blood, the main character is a violent and malevolent figure who denies Christ's existence. Therefore, from O'Conner's perspective, the path to a utopia some a journey that must come from within in a complex and violent world; and faith in Christ is a vehicle in which this utopia can become a reality.

Breece Pancake

Breece Pancake was also a well-known author that wrote a series of short stories that mostly appeared in the Atlantic. His utopia dealt with southern style living. From a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, that Pancake wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing:

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave."

His stories cover a lot of the wreckage that was left behind when the United States started becoming a more industrialized nation. Pancake's stories and their characters, though from the nineteen-seventies, felt both immediately recognizable and pertinent to the present moment; set mostly in the coal country of West Virginia, "The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake" features a cast of hardscrabble laborers whose lives are circumscribed by failing farms, diminishing economic prospects, and the environmental blight caused by the harvesting of fossil fuels (Michaud, 2014). Therefore, the contrast between utopia and dytopia in Pancake's writings deals with this industrial transformation. One of the interesting things about his stories that deals with modern culture is that the popular movie "Fight Club" was inspired by his works.

Discussion

All three authors cover many similar themes yet have some dissimilarity. One similarity that you can find in all of the works listed is that they include violence in one form or another. Each story explains or paints the causes of the violence in a different frame however. In Flannery O'Conner's works the violence stems from the denial of Jesus Christ. In Pancake's stories the violence is part of the southern culture that is magnified by the harsh conditions that were introduced post-industrialization. Finally, Cormac McCarthy explains the causes of violence by the tragedies that were incurred by a young boy in this childhood that expanded exponentially as he grew older.

Violence is a fact of life that most likely will never go away. Devastating events can occur from acts of God or from human interactions. However, explaining these misfortunes is something that every individual must somehow try to reconcile. Some do it through faith, others through secular coping mechanisms, and others may fail to do it altogether. The dystopias that are presented in the stories all give different accounts of people trying to deal with misfortune. Given the fact that misfortune is practically a given in the human experience, coping with it should be a priority in everyone's life; not only for themselves but also for their families and their community at large.