“Some Other Function”: Autobiographical Trauma in “Good Country People”

ABSTRACT: Scholarship on the work of southern Catholic author Flannery O’Connor has a tradition of examining her work through an autobiographical lens, piecing apart the aspects of her life hidden within her fiction. Through a reading of “Good Country People” (one of the O’Connor stories frequently analyzed as autobiography) informed by trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s articulations of traumatic repetition and trauma’s incomprehensible nature, I contend that “Good Country People” represents not merely a collage of fictionalized aspects of O’Connor’s life but a kind of traumatic autobiography, revealing within the sophistications of her prose the thousand quiet disappointments of her singular life.