Articles

Love That Cuts Like the Cold Wind: Friedrich Nietzsche in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away

Joseph Natali

Abstract

Joseph Natali argues that Flannery O’Connor possessed a deep intuitive understanding of Nietzsche’s project, and seriously engaged with it in her work, embracing parts of it while rejecting others. Natali shows how O’Connor genuinely embraces Nietzsche’s evaluation of Christian pity in the modern age while rejecting his assertion that religion generally, and Christianity specifically, grows out of nihilistic psychological impulses.

Citations

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 81.

Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis Coser (Marquette University Press, 1994).

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Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 148.

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