Free Will In Flannery O Connor's In Good Country People

You have the freedom to go out into the world and be happy, help someone, or just be you. You also have the freedom to go out there and ruin someone’s life. Everyone has free will and can choose what they want to do with their lives. Free will means being able to do whatever you desire in life. There is no limits to what you can do in your life. As with anything in life it could either be used to bring happiness or bring sorrow. These decisions can be very subjective and it all depends on the person. Some people murder because of life traumas and others help the less fortunate because they have more than they need. The stories of author Flannery O’Connor present people who are morally corrupt and have free will. These characters are rude,
disturbing, grotesque, and they make the average person wince with disgust. O’Connor chose to write about these characters because she believed that free will is a God given right to all humans but she also wanted to convey the negative side of having free will and not following the will of God. O'Connor's first story titled Wise Blood perfectly shows free will being used to bring chaos to the world. The main character Hazel Motes claims to believe in nothing and actively tries to preach his beliefs to anybody who talks to him about religion. This may not seem too bad at first but he becomes increasingly malicious later in the story. Hazel has the freedom to go out there and try to preach his beliefs but he starts to get in the way of other people’s lives. His free will makes him believe that nothing really matters and he can sin all he wants without any consequences. This belief of doing whatever you want because nothing really matter ties in with the meaning of existentialism. Existentialism is a philosophy that centers around free will and finding meaning to life from choices and life experiences. In this philosophy being responsible with choices is crucial. O’Connor did not believe that existentialism is right because she believed that the world is corrupt and the only thing that fix it is the belief in christ. This is why in many of her stories the main themes center around religion, free will, and disgust with the world because she believed that belief systems like existentialism or free will were making the world rot. In the story, O’Connor writes “...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.” The choices that someone has to make can be very daunting. Trying to figure out who and what you are is not easy for anyone and maybe life has no meaning. Existentialism claims that you achieve this by the choices you make in life, this is what the quote means by having many wills conflicting in one man, making choices is confusing and overwhelming. Existentialism claims that decisions are not without stress or consequence and that's why a person has to be responsible, but since haze has free will he is trying to sin without thinking of consequences. “There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”O’Connor is trying to convey how people like Haze Motes who do not believe in anything are ruining the world, she makes him seem so arrogant, stubborn, and childlike by his screaming that there is no truth to people when everyone has free will to believe whatever they want. This is the negative side of existentialism and free will according to O’Connor. She believed that it is a false belief and the world should be believing in Christ. In Good Country People, some of the same themes are employed as Wise Blood for example the main character Hulga is an atheist and is very pretentious and mean to those around her because she thinks she is smarter than them because she has a degree.
O’Connor blatantly tries to make these kinds of characters the most obnoxious and rude and overall disgusting. Hazel Motes was a man that is described as having eyes that seep into his skull and Hulga has a wooden leg, has heart problems and is pretentious. The characters that are the most existentialist are usually the most grotesque. O’Connor has these beliefs because she was raised in a catholic family. In Good Country People Hulga believes that she is saving people from having illusions because she believes she does not fall into that sort of stuff. She is selfish and just like Hazel, she only comes to see the error of her ways after something horrible happens to her. What O’Connor is trying to say with the recurring event of grace is that existentialists cannot base their life beliefs on the choices they make because someday something will happen and change their whole worldview. In the story Hulga’s book states "Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing." Hulga is saying that science is not looking into the fact that maybe life is about nothing. One characteristic of the philosophy of existentialism is
that people are at their best when they are going against themselves and fighting for their lives. That is why in many of O’Connor’s stories the character realizes their errors when something horrible happens to them or when they are about to die. In the story Hulga’s mother Mrs. Hopewell explains "My daughter is an atheist and won't let me keep the Bible in my parlor." Once again another character in O’Connor’s story does not believe in religion. This is a recurring characteristic because most of her work is meant to show the reason why the world is rotting away. Hulga claims to be an atheist but in the story sometimes it is clear that sometimes she believes in God and that is because of free will, she only pretends to be an atheist so she can be selfish and think she is better than anyone else with her PhD. It's not because she actually does not feel any connection with religion. At the end of the story Hulga realises her mistakes and the burden of free will. O’Connor’s short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, introduces a character that uses his free will to try to get the best of other people for his own satisfaction.
Mr. shiftlet arrives at the house of Lucynell Crater and her daughter who has the same name. He has a mysterious appearance and he never mentions where he is from and avoids the question and when he tries to answer he says that he can say wherever he’s from but you can never know because what if he’s lying. Just from that, it is clear that he has gotten his way before. Shiftlet agrees to fix up Lucynell’s house and be allowed stay there. Soon after getting the trust of Mrs. Lucynell, he marries the daughter and gets the car that belonged to the mother. He abandons the daughter at a diner while she is asleep and takes the car. He married a girl and made the mother trust him just so he could get a free car. O’Connor makes Mr.shiftlet so malicious and evil because she wants to show how morally corrupt a person with free will can be. He has no sense of consequence and thinks only about how he can get things for himself. Mr. Shiftlet is also missing an arm and O’connor made him this way because it represents how his physical appearance is just as twisted as his personality. He tricks and abandons and innocent women who is mentally handicapped and leaves her on her own even though he knows that she can’t take care of herself. It may seem like the mother Mrs. Lucynell is a sweet old lady who got tricked but she
wasn’t so sweet. Actually she’s not sweet at all. Existentialism is the search for a personal meaning of life, and that is what Mrs. Lucynell wanted. She gave up her only daughter because she wanted a son in law to take care of her property. She wanted to go away and experience life without the burden of her daughter and explore her own free will. Why would Mr. Shiftlet want a car? He wanted it because that way he could accomplish his true goal of seeking out his path in life and find his true personal meaning. No matter how he manages to get it. They both were malicious characters that took advantage of an innocent character and that’s what O’Connor tried to present as her message. Philosophies like existentialism and atheism only help ruin the world for society and innocent people. People can follow their own free will but their will surely be many people using it for evil. Her message is that we need religion and to not only follow our free will but the will of God. O’Connor’s story Greenleaf takes it one step further to show that people who seek a life of fulfillment through their own choices and not from other people or God usually get what they deserve in the end. Mrs. May is a self righteous old woman who believes she is in a better social status and doesn't see anyone as her equal. She falsely believes that she is above everyone else and can't see the value of people are not equal to her. She is like Hulga, the character from Good Country People. Mrs. May believes that she knows the choices you have to make in order to be good, she is self reliant, and that she has everything to succeed. O’Connor knows that Mrs. may cannot have a relationship with God as much as she wants to because she follows her own self righteous choices and free will and not the will of God. This is evident in the differing reactions that the Greenleafs’ and Mrs. May have towards the bull. The Greenleafs see the bull as something that should be left on its own because it is a creature that God created so they should respect it’s place in nature. Mrs. May believes that it should be removed, she behaves this way because her whole life she has always done what she wanted because she has free will and so she tries to make her life however she wants it and not like anybody else wants it. She thinks that her choices are always correct and it’s about herself and what she wants not what God intended. O’Connor writes “She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.” Mrs. May’s desire to impose her choices and her choices only on everything in her life is prevalent in this quote where its explains that she only followed what she believed to be true based on her choices and life experience and not what any religion says. In the end of the story the bull gores her through the heart, O’Connor writes “she continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed – the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky – and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.” At the time of her death, Mrs. May became conscious of the fact that her way of life was not going to lead her to God, the story says that she does not believe in the religion she follows but at the end she encounters God and knows that her materialistic and pretentious way of life was not the will of God. This is why the light is unbearable to her because she is not on her way to God. She is heading somewhere else, or she finds the light unbearable because she still hasn't changed her ways and is going against God. Free will can make people delusional with power to control their own lives to the point where they believe they are bigger than God. O’Connor’s themes, characters, and events all came from her life as a catholic. In her mind free will and existentialism have no merit and no value to human society. These philosophies are only hurting human society and leading it away from the path of God. O’Connor claimed that free will leads to people becoming self righteous, leading them to put others down just like Mrs. May and Hulga. Its makes people selfish like Mrs. Lucynell and Mr. Shiftlet. Overall it makes people not see the world with respect and believing in God and his path makes people appreciate the things on this earth that's God put here for us. It makes people sympathetic towards others just like like we feel sympathy for the son of God. The existentialist belief that life could mean nothing, is an insult to O’Connor who claimed that life is here for a reason and that reason is God. Moral corruption is at the heart of every one who has given their life to freedom. Her characters are vile and disgusting and have horrible physical appearances that represent how rotten they are inside. Hazel Motes has eyes that seem to seep into his skull. Hulga has a wooden leg. Mr. shiftlet has no arm. These characters are a direct portrayal of how Flannery O’Connor thought the world would be when religion was gone and philosophies like existentialism took over. In her eyes human free will was going to be the end of God’s green Earth. Free will also makes way for people to become more materialistic which makes them more selfish. Hazel Motes in Wise Blood is so materialistic that he starts basing his faith in his beat up old car and eventually when the car is destroyed he loses everything. Just like Mrs. May cared more about her farm and ended up being killed for not letting the bull be free. She always had to have it her way. Our choices in the end are always up to us, Flannery O’Connor’s message was to think more about our choices and if they are really following the will of God. God’s will is what will save the world from philosophies that only serve to make people more corrupt, evil, and disgusting. The works of Flannery O’Connor remind us that if the world would stop serving themselves and start serving God than we would all be living in a better place with no hatred. Free will leads to a life of despair and unfulfillment that only God could ever fill.