I read O’Connor’s short stories “The River” and “A Circle in the Fire” recently, and a phrase from the praise on the back cover resonated with me: “some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction written this century.” I normally interpret disturbing fiction as morally ambiguous or reveling in perversion for its nihilistic glory, but O’Connor’s fiction is disturbing in that it requires you to work on it and some of the details are ugly. It isn’t easy, and these two left me asking what I should think about them.

I think part of what disturbed me was my desire to see white and black hats.

In “The River,” a little boy, age 5, is taken to hear a rural preacher who speaks from the muddy river in which he baptizes his listeners. He talks about the kingdom of Christ being a river and entering that kingdom through the river. His message is confusing when he gives it and complicated when repeated by his congregation, but the idea of the river sticks with the boy, and it changes his life. He leaves his family, for whom everything was a joke, and embraces the theology presented by the river preacher.

At first, I thought it disturbing that even a poorly stated gospel message doesn’t result in hope or life. The preacher’s theology is bad. He’s flattered when people say he has healed the sick and wants that to be true, even though he claims he can’t heal anyone. What he says does point to Christ, but he appears to want the signs and wonders, those visible clues to the power of his ministry, so badly that he is willing to fabricate them. Maybe this desire to point to himself is what muddles his sermon. So the preacher and woman who takes the boy to have him baptized don’t wear white hats. They’re more flawed than that.

Yet as I write this, I wonder if the boy’s total commitment to the preacher’s river theology is the essential idea of this story. The boy wants to enter the kingdom of Christ, and that kingdom is found in or through the river. Despite the confusing sermon and the poor witness of the only Christians he knows, he wants to join the preacher’s side, and he’s willing to fight to get there.

In “A Circle in the Fire,” a grandmotherly woman takes in three boys out of a kind of mercy, and they give her a great deal of trouble. She treats them too softly, and they repay her with meanness. What bothers me the most about this story is the implication of the title. The circle in the fire allusion is to the three young prophets in Babylon who were thrown into the fiery furnace and kept safe there by the Lord. This imagery refers to the three boys, the future mafia-types, no better than hoodlums, who are polite enough to the woman’s face, but very disrespectful when she’s away. Is O’Connor suggesting they are doing the Lord’s work in a sense when they vandalize the woman’s property and lie to her? Or is it that the woman doesn’t wear a white hat in this story, and the judgment, as it were, that comes to her is justly deserved despite the jerk kids who deliver it to her? This would be similar to the Old Testament record of God judging Israel by having the Assyrians conquer them. The Assyrians were the bad guys, clearly the black hats in that part of history, but the Israelites had muddied their hats into a nasty gray, ignoring God’s direction for centuries, so he judged them harshly at the hands of their enemies.

Maybe the essential idea of this second story is that the woman who thinks she controls everything needed to see how limited she is and that the sins she demonstrates are not less significant than the ones of the hoodlum boys. And I say this even while thinking I may be missing the whole point of this and any well-written story, that is, by trying to boil them down to points is to miss the points altogether.