In “The Artificial Nigger,” Flannery O’Connor provides directions for the reader to precisely follow her characters’ circuitous route from the city center to the suburban train station where they end their journey. While the Heads find themselves in three of the city’s shopping centers, O’Connor is careful to keep them from coming within sight of any of the city’s churches. O’Connor uses this commercialized Atlanta to examines the claim that commerce can make people “too busy to hate.” She then moves into an allegorical register in which the market represents judgement and the Heads experience grace only after leaving it.
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Grady, Henry W. The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady. New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1910. Google Books. Web. 11 December 2015.
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GriefMark (2015) The Age of the Crisis of Man, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UPPrint.
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Haddox, Thomas F. “The City Reconsidered: Problems and Possibilities of Urban Community in ‘A Stroke of Good Fortune’ and ‘The Artificial Nigger.’” The Flannery O’Connor Review 3 (2005): 4–18. EBSCO. Web. 11 December 2015.
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Hauerwas, Stanley, and Ralph Wood. “How the Church Became Invisible: A Christian Reading of American Literary Tradition.” Religion & Literature 38.1 (2006): 61–93. JSTOR. Web. 11 December 2015.
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JacobsJane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random HousePrint.
