Exploring the Text

1. The characters in “Good Country People” are defined, at least in part, by the clichés they fall back on. How do these clichés help develop the characters? What does Flannery O’Connor tell us about human nature through these clichés?

   Question

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   Exploring the Text: - The characters in “Good Country People” are defined, at least in part, by the clichés they fall back on. How do these clichés help develop the characters? What does Flannery O’Connor tell us about human nature through these clichés?
2. What do you make of the names that O’Connor gives her characters? What expectations do they create? How are your expectations fulfilled? How are they overturned?

   Question

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   Exploring the Text: - What do you make of the names that O’Connor gives her characters? What expectations do they create? How are your expectations fulfilled? How are they overturned?
3. What do you think Joy/Hulga’s artificial leg and glasses represent? What about Manley’s valise?

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   Exploring the Text: - What do you think Joy/Hulga’s artificial leg and glasses represent? What about Manley’s valise?
4. What do you think O’Connor really means by “good country people”?

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   Exploring the Text: - What do you think O’Connor really means by “good country people”?
5. Do you think the story is funny? Explain why or why not.

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   Exploring the Text: - Do you think the story is funny? Explain why or why not.
6. How does O’Connor expect us to feel about Joy/Hulga? Is she a sympathetic character or an evil one? In what ways does her disability reflect her character? What use does she make of her degrees and intelligence? What is her condition at the end of the story?

   Question

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   Exploring the Text: - How does O’Connor expect us to feel about Joy/Hulga? Is she a sympathetic character or an evil one? In what ways does her disability reflect her character? What use does she make of her degrees and intelligence? What is her condition at the end of the story?
7. The critic Frederick Crews wrote about Flannery O’Connor in the New York Review of Books:

   For all her private loyalty to the church’s hopeful teachings, then, the world of O’Connor’s fiction remains radically askew. Readers immersed in that fiction without a lifeline to the doctrinal assurance found in her lectures and letters tend to feel an existential vertigo at the very moments where the Christian critics want them to feel most worshipful. And this response cannot be dismissed as a mere error, a product of incomplete knowledge. O’Connor’s works, we must understand, are not finally about salvation but about doom—the sudden and irremediable realization that there is no exit from being, for better or worse, exactly who one is.

   How does “Good Country People” illustrate Crews’s observation?

   Question

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   Exploring the Text: - The critic Frederick Crews wrote about Flannery O’Connor in the New York Review of Books:For all her private loyalty to the church’s hopeful teachings, then, the world of O’Connor’s fiction remains radically askew. Readers immersed in that fiction without a lifeline to the doctrinal assurance found in her lectures and letters tend to feel an existential vertigo at the very moments where the Christian critics want them to feel most worshipful. And this response cannot be dismissed as a mere error, a product of incomplete knowledge. O’Connor’s works, we must understand, are not finally about salvation but about doom—the sudden and irremediable realization that there is no exit from being, for better or worse, exactly who one is.How does “Good Country People” illustrate Crews’s observation?