SOURCE: Zornado, Joseph. “A Becoming Habit: Flannery O'Connor's Fiction of Unknowing.” Religion & Literature 29, no. 2 (summer 1997): 27-59.

In the following essay, Zornado explores the relationship between O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith and her art and finds parallels between her literary sensibilities and those of Thomas Merton.

Its almost impossible to write about supernatural Grace in fiction. We almost have to approach it negatively.

—Flannery O'Connor, Habit [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor] 144

Much of Flannery O'Connor's fiction undermines the notion that her texts, or any text for that matter, offers the reader a chance at fixed comprehensibility. In fact, O'Connor's fiction often clears itself away as a meaning-bearing icon in order to introduce the reader to something other, to the mystery latent and invisible in the manners. O'Connor remains remarkable as an avowed Catholic and as a writer because she resisted spelling out that mystery though her...