Explain why Flannery O'Connor feels violence is necessary in her stories to get the attention of both characters and readers.

Flannery O’Connor often uses violence in her stories for a
number of reasons.

In the first place, O’Connor felt that
most human beings, at least in the modern era, live complacent, comfortable,
unquestioning lives. They focus on their present material existences and neglect their
ultimate spiritual fates. They take life for granted and fail to realize that life on
earth is merely a very brief prelude to an eternal existence, either in heaven or in
hell. By using violence in her fiction, O’Connor often seeks to shock both her
characters and her readers into an awareness of what really matters in life. Often the
characters and readers who are shocked in this way no longer take life – or other
persons – for granted.

For example, at the end of
“Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the death of Julian’s mother helps Julian finally
appreciate how much she meant to him and how much he should have been loving and
appreciating her throughout the story. He would never have had this important revelation
if his mother had not been struck down violently in front of him. Similarly, at the end
of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” it is only when the grandmother has seen her entire
family slaughtered, and only when she is facing imminent death herself, that she is
finally able to actually live the Christian values about which she
has merely prattled previously.

Another reason that
O’Connor often uses violence in her fiction, including violent death, is to suggest that
our physical bodies, and our present physical existences, are relatively unimportant in
the grand Christian scheme of things. Thus, many readers are shocked when the
grandmother is killed at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” They consider her
death pointless, meaningless – a tragic waste.  O’Connor, however, encourages us to see
the end of this story as a kind of comic, happy victory for the grandmother. In the last
split seconds of her life, she lives the kind of life she should have been living for
years. In the last few moments of her existence, she lives as Christ would have wanted
her to live all along. Thus it is not surprising that the grandmother looks almost happy
after she is shot, whereas it is The Misfit who seems uncomfortable and
unhappy.

O’Connor felt that if she had written pleasant
stories with conventionally “happy endings,” she would have had no impact on modern
culture, which had become so unfamiliar or unconcerned with standard Christian truths
that it had to be shocked back into an awareness of concepts that had long been taken
for granted in previous, spiritually healthier eras.