Background of the Study

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Literature must be always interesting; it must have a structure and an aesthetic purpose, a total coherence and effect, and it must stand in recognizable relation to life Rene Wellek, 1956: 212. Literature must give the readers pleasure and knowledge, and can add their intellectual. In literature, we can find three genres. One of the literary genre, prose, is often classified into some other forms, such as novel, romance, short story, and biography. The novel, as Richard Taylor says in his book Understanding the Element of Litarature 1981: 46, is the modern or living form of narrative fiction which often shares constructional features, subject matter and themes derived from the epic, romance, allegory and satire, it remains distinctively separates from them. One sub-form of novel, gothic is very popular from the 1760s onwards until the 1820s. Gothic has had a considerable influence on fiction since still apparent in the 1990s and is of much importance in the evolution of the ghost story and the horror story. Most Gothic novels are prose forms that contain horror stories or tales of mystery, intended to chill the spine and curdle the blood. As a subgenre of Gothic style, Southern Gothic could be considered as a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents http:en wikipedia.orgwikiSouthern_Gothic. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike the predecessor, it Universitas Sumatera Utara uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South. One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque. It is a term applied to a decorative art in sculpture, painting, and architecture, characterized by fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature. It was so named after the ancient paintings and decorations found in the underground chambers grotte of Roman ruins. By extension, grotesque is applied to anything having the qualities of grotesque art: absurd, ugly, incongruous, abnormal, unnatural, ironic, bizarre, macabre, and fantastic. Modern critics use “the grotesque” to refer to special types of writing, to kinds of characters, and to subject matters. This includes situations, places, or stock characters that often possess some cringe-inducing qualities, typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness, but enough good traits that readers find themselves interested nevertheless. A grotesque character is a person who took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it Whenever fictional characters appear who are either physically or spiritually deformed and perform abnormal actions, the work can be called grotesque Harmon William, 2000: 240. Flannery O’Connor 1925-1964, one of the best-known grotesque writers, draws the characters and setting from the rural South she knows so well, shortly after World War II and uses religious theme 1 1 South is a Bible Belt country so the grotesque is apparently detected by readers when the religious theme is used . People in this novel think of themselves as Christian or otherwise “good people,” but their actions or attitudes reveal otherwise. Their pride blinds them to their own flaws, and only violence, Universitas Sumatera Utara usually from an unlikely source, opens their eyes and offers them a chance at redemption. For O’Connor, her native-American South is the perfect landscape against which to paint the grotesque characteristics, as the South is a violent place and a conservative one. O’Connor creates the absurd of the hero, Hazel Motes, who isolates himself from God and does not believe in society’s norm or law, and the monstrous figure, Enoch Emery who changes himself into gorilla suit. O’Connor uses number 666 to symbolize Hazel of Hazel’s nihilist, and Hazel’s car is to symbolize Hazel pulpit. There is much violence through the Taulkinham’s people, the irony and comic quality. O’Connor also creates mystery that leaves the readers with many questions in their mind. I select Wise Blood to be analyzed because I feel interested in the grotesque characteristics: the monstrous quality, the violent characters, the usage of symbol, the comic element, the irony, the absurdity, and the mystery of redemption that O’Connor creates in her novel.

1.2 Problem of the Analysis