Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor

The theme of Innocence and Experience is presented in the short story Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor. Hulga is a thirty years old woman with a wooden leg that clearly has resentment towards her mother for treating her like a child. Hulga lost her leg at a young age and has a terrible heart condition so her mother always felt the need to treat her a child. She has done everything in her power to go against her mother. Knowing that she is not like the women around her that marry off at an early age such as Camarae or as pretty as Glynese, Hulga drowns herself in reading and has even obtained a PhD. Her knowledge leads her to believe that she is much smarter than those around her until she meets a young man by the name of “Manley Pointer.” Pointer captures he attention and for once she thinks that someone understands her and acknowledges that fact that she is different until he takes off with her wooden leg and leaves her alone for with no way of getting down the ladder and back home. An innocent meeting with a guy that she thought understood her turned into an experience that Hulga will never forget and I believe will eventually leave her destroyed and only more distrustful of people.

Novel- Other Rooms, Other Voices

Joel Knox, a young boy off to meet his father for the first time and encounters some really interesting people on his way and while there. The theme Coming of age is presented in the novel as Joel establishes a relationship with his stepmother’s cross dressing homosexual cousin Randolph and realizes that he too is homosexual. The relationship that he forms with Randolph is an important relationship Joel has while living with his father. It is a relationship that he longed to have with his father but unfor...

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...ely Hunter. A story about loneliness, which may have been a topic that was close to home considering she spent most of her life very ill. Sadly, she suffered a stroke and passed after 46 days in a coma. Truman Capote, unlike McCullers knew from a child that he wanted to be a writer. Aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama raised him however, like McCullers he too went to live in New York where he got his first break in writing for The New Yorker. Capote wrote his first novel Other Rooms, Other Voices in 1948, which received notoriety for its homosexual theme. Raised in the South, as a lonely child inspired Capote to write such imaginative novels became a person that loved to throw lavish parties and be around people. Capote unfortunately passed from excessive use of drugs and alcohol. Both overcame their pasts and took hold of their futures and left behind a piec