| abstract | Emmanuel Levinas famously claimed ethics as the first philosophy, arguing that all metaphysical and epistemological claims
should be built upon an understanding of an individual's nonreciprocal responsibility to the other. This dissertation argues that Levinas's ethics offers a framework
and language through which to read anew the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Like Levinas, O'Connor's oeuvre insists upon the individual's nonreciprocal responsibility
to the other. Through an explanation and exploration of some of Levinas's most important concepts—namely the face-to-face encounter with the other, nonreciprocal
responsibility, alienation, disruption, trauma, and sameness versus otherness—this dissertation reveals how we can understand in new and significant ways the moral
fabric and anthropological underpinnings of O'Connor's fiction. Levinas's ethics helps us connect the characters' solipsism, the violence that populates the fiction,
and the stories' moments of grace and conversion. Throughout O'Connor's fiction, isolated and estranged characters are challenged to accept responsibility for the
other, whether the other is hired help, like Mr. Guizac in "The Displaced Person"; a grandson, like Nelson in "The Artificial Nigger"; or a violent criminal, like
The Misfit from "A Good Man is Hard to Find." In all three stories, the characters must encounter their responsibility to the other prior to having their personal
epiphanies. While they encounter a deeply mysterious and spiritual reality, they must first encounter their practical obligation to their fellow man before they can
receive the grace of conversion. Levinas explains how this encounter with the other—this encounter with the other as truly other—is disruptive and even traumatic.
But O'Connor's fiction, extending Levinas's ethics, also reveals how an acceptance of responsibility can become a gateway into personal fulfillment and even bliss.
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