Welty's characters v O'Connor's

Writers do love their own characters. We have long and complicated relationships with those we create, and the love can be difficult and challenging - but there you have it. When someone reviewed Exiles and found it a great story with unlikable characters - well, that really hurt - I'd have rather he'd found the opposite. I felt I could never be friends with that reviewer. Been continuing to read Eudora Welty's "Collected Stories" and thinking about her place in the pantheon, and in particular trying to distinguish and identify her style and way of thinking, in part by comparisons with her contemporaries. It's obvious to any reader that both Welty and Flannery O'Connor love their characters and get great pleasure and amusement from creating them, capturing them - particularly the dialogue and humor. It's also obvious that O'Connor's characters are more outsiders, even outlaws - and she has a much greater attraction to the grotesque. O'Connor loves her characters but, I suspect, with a bit of an edge, that it's a judgmental love. She doesn't condone them or their ill behavior, but she uses them as part of a grander scheme: her hard-wrought religious allegories. She will chronicle the sin but will not offer redemption - that's not her province. Welty's love for her characters is softer, at times even sentimental: think of The Hitch-Hiker and compare with A Good Man is Hard to Find: the killing in Welty's story more random and foolish, the main character is a good man, trying to do good in a world gone wrong. Other stories - The Key, The Whistle - show strong sympathy for the poor and dispossessed, something you almost never see in O'Connor.