Fiction by Welty, Cheever, Ellison,

¶ … Fiction by Welty, Cheever, Ellison, Malamud, Baldwin, and O'Connor Grotesque and realistic elements in fiction by Welty, Cheever, Ellison, Malamud, Baldwin, and O'Connor American fiction can be realistic or surrealistic, understated or grotesque. The authors Eudora Welty, John Cheever, James Baldwin, and Bernard Malamud tend to be classified in the realistic school of American narrative contemporary fiction. All three authors use a relatively narrow social context to highlight universal American themes, such as concerns about belonging and finding meaning in life.

In contrast, Flannery O'Connor and Ralph Ellison use extreme, often deliberately unrealistic images and plots to create modern-day myths to examine what is wrong in American society. Eudora Welty's use of realism can be seen in her famous short story "A Worn Path," which tells the tale of Old Phoenix, a woman who must get medicine for her grandson by walking a great distance from her rural home to a nearby city. The story is told almost entirely through physical description, and is utterly unsentimental.

John Cheever's fiction is set in a far different milieu, that of American suburbia. However, Cheever uses ordinary details such as his character's drinking, conspicuous consumption, and their infidelities to highlight the emptiness of their lives. Bernard Malamud's Jewish context focuses humble, ordinary details of American Jewish urban life, although anti-Semitism and despair often cause his characters to behave in extreme and highly emotional ways, as in "The Mourners." James Baldwin's tales such as "Sonny's Blues," contrasts the narrator's more staid life with the drug-using, blues-playing Sonny.

Baldwin uses ordinary details about life an urban ghetto to show the emotionally scarring effects of racism. Despite their stories' atmospheres of verisimilitude, there are elements of the grotesque in Cheever and even Welty. Welty also wrote humorous stories in a Southern grotesque vein, such as her tale of the profoundly dysfunctional family in "Why I live at the PO." Cheever's stories like "The Five-Forty-Eight" often have a humorous tone, even though this tale relates the serious story of a secretary who is sexually harassed and fired.

She stalks her former boss on the train and terrifies him with her unbalanced, grotesque appearance -- and a gun. Yet perhaps no American author embraced the grotesque with the same enthusiasm as the Southern Flannery O'Connor. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor uses the example of a family annihilated by the side of the road by an outlaw named the Misfit to show the bankruptcy of American life.

Instead of an evil serial killer, the Misfit is portrayed as a kind of force of divine justice, who unintentionally allows the grandmother of the family to experience grace. She says that she believes the man is like one of own her children before he kills her. In O'Connor's stories, the characters do not fight for their insight, rather it is given in mysterious, often deadly ways, and it always originates with the divine, not with the human will.

If O'Connor represents the most extreme version of grotesque American literature, Ralph Ellison represents perhaps the most balanced use of the grotesque in American letters. Invisible Man begins with a "Battle Royale," or a forced fight between young, African-American men for money. The title character is so alienated from society by the suffering inflicted upon him as a black man he begins to embrace his invisibility, after he.