Why does Flannery O'Conner use violence in her story "Good Country People" to get the attention of both readers & characters? Flannery...

In O'Connor's stories, grace often comes at the moment of
violence or even grisly death.  This theme of the grotesque serves a clear purpose for
Flannery O'Connor. Critic Gilbert H. Muller states that this use of the grotesque is not
gratuitous; rather it is employed in order "to reveal underlying and ssentially
theological concepts."

This concept of what Muller terms
"displacement" is evinced in "Good Country People" as Hulga rejects all the platitudes
of the "good country people," feeling herself superior to them because of her
education.  But, to the others, Hulga is perceived as a freak because of her attitude
and her artificial leg.  Yet, she ends up becoming a kind of Christ figure, a reminder
of the "presence of the unseen, mysterious God."  For, like Christ she is made a victim
by one of the "good country people," the bible salesman.  When Hulga loses her leg, she
is freed from her nihilism as she learns about evil.  O'Connor herself
wrote,

I have
found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and
preparing them to accept their moment of grace...This idea that reality is something to
which we must be returned at considerabl cost, is one which is seldom understood by the
casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world. (from
Everything That Rises Must
Converge)

Thus,
the act of violence against Hulga returns her to the reality that there are other
educations which she has missed, that all country people are not to be taken
lightly. So, in losing her negative philosophy, Hulga finds her way back to beliefs in
good and evil. Violence frees the soul of the person so that he/she can receive grace;
this action of grace in territor normally occupied by the devil shakes the reader to
attention to the message of Flannery O'Connor.