What’s So Funny

What So Funny?

A humorous story is a comedy. A serious story is a drama. Put both of these kinds of stories together and you get Flannery O’Connor’s writing style. O’Connor’s short stories begin with an up beat tone, and then slowly trickle into a more serious, dramatical tone. This style of writing is what helped O’Connor’s stories stick in our minds from her death until now. Her short stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, “Revelation”, and “Good Country People” are good examples of her writing in this manor. Each of these stories starts off with a humorous theme, and then gets serious towards the end to get its point across. With this style of writing, one can pin point the irony in her stories. Where her stories switch from humorous to dramatical is where the story’s irony and climax appear, and with that sudden change of tone it brings out the climax from the rest of the story. At that moment, a reader should be able to identify the theme O’Connor is trying to push across. The two different tones also serve a purpose to the characters in the story. The humorous tone tells the reader what type of character they are, and what to expect from them later in the story. The more humor in the story the more we learn about the characters actions. When the tone gets serious, one sees the personality traits established at the beginning of the story take action. That why the humor always comes first, so that it can explain the character’s action later in the story, when the tone gets serious.

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, O’Connor used humor to give the family a personality. Without the humor, one would not have known that the children in the story were very out spoken. The grandmother trying to trick them in to going to Tennessee instead of Florida by mentioning the Misfit was humorous until they actually met the Misfit. The drama started when they where in the car crash which lead to them meeting the Misfit, which lead to the family’s death. In O’Connor’s style of writing this story started as a fun family vacation that turned in to a murder story.

In the second story, “Revelation”, humor is used to introduce everyone in the doctor’s office, and how they all differed from each other. It was funny how the main character was so cocky, and how she was glad that God did not make her “white trash” or a “nigger”. It was humorous to read her mind set and how she look at things,