摘要

经典短篇小说《好人难寻》(1983)是美国南方文学作家弗兰纳里· 奥康纳(1925-1964)的代表作，通过描写一个家庭悲剧揭示了二战后西方的道德堕落和精神危机。因作品充斥着宗教、暴力、怪诞与畸人的形象，所以引起学者们广泛的研究兴趣。在《好人难寻》中，大量原型的运用十分生动形象，为小说增添了无穷魅力。本文从原型批评理论入手，通过分析原型意象、写作主题来深入挖掘小说内涵。此外，本文着重分析了祖母和不合时宜者的原型形象来进一步探讨作者的写作意图。结论部分指出：小说中诸多原型的运用旨在揭示当时美国南方人民精神荒原的现象，以此唤醒人们对宗教的信仰。

关键词  《好人难寻》，宗教，原型批评

Abstract

The classic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1983) is a magnum opus of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) who is one of the representatives of American southern literature. This fiction uncovers the moral degeneration and belief crisis in the west after the Second World War through portraying a tragedy of a family. The work has aroused great interest among scholars and critics for the last half a century, because it is filled with religion, violence, grotesque and freaks. In this fiction, archetypes are applied very vividly and frequently, which is an irreplaceable part of the charm the fiction possesses. The paper intends to fully reveal the connotation by analyzing the images and the themes from the perspective of archetypal criticism. What’s more, this paper focuses on examining the archetypes of Grandmother and Misfit so as to better understand the writing intentions of O’Connor. The conclusion part explains the reason why O’Connor uses so many archetypes, and views violence and death as the only way to get salvation is to highlight the spiritual wasteland of the American southern people and awaken their sincere faith in religion.

Keywords  “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, religion, archetypal criticism

1  Introduction
Flannery O’Connor is one of the foremost American fiction writers of the 20th century. She was a Southern gentle woman who never carried a banner, and never created a slogan, but used her considerable literary talent to write novels and stories to probe the inner heart of the human beings. As a typical Roman Catholic, her works are filled with the strong religious atmosphere more or less, like the epiphany, the salvation of Christ, the grace of God and so on. She writes two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and 31 short stories. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of the most controversial fiction among them because of its horrible plots and symbolic characters.