SOURCE: Byars, John. “Prophecy and Apocalyptic in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 16 (1987): 34-42.

In the following essay, Byars underscores the importance of prophecy in O'Connor's work and asserts that “in a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment.”

Critics have often noticed the crucial role prophets and false prophets play in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. She names characters Enoch and Obadiah; she transforms three adolescent vandals into “prophets dancing in the fiery furnace”; she assigns important revelatory roles to those as diverse as the enormous Mrs. Shortley, an ugly Wellesley student, a young criminal, and a Bible salesman; and finally she makes the struggle against their vocations as prophets the major action that envelops the protagonists of her two novels. In a real...