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The core of the narrative in Flannery O'Connor’s two short stories discussed in this essay is the encounter between the main characters and the devil-intruder. The encounter is violent and fatal: the devil walks away with the most valuable loot, shaking their “self-intoxicated identity” to its roots. The devil-intruder forcefully crosses the threshold of the self-enclosed and supposedly inviolate world of the intruded and destroys their smug views of superiority and shallow sense of ownership by depriving them of what they most value. In the process, the mysterious intruder administers demonically anarchic power, ripping apart the outward facade of the intruded and exposes the fallen and sinful self. O'Connor’s devil is not to be “simply taken this or that psychological tendency,” but to be clearly recognized as the devil for the sheer malignancy he displays in his double-dealing ways. Supposing “the devil teaches most of the lesson that leads to self-knowledge,” O'Connor bestows on the darkly disruptive figure the role of playing a spiritual catalyst by delivering a harsh lesson, which may lead the self-knowledge of the intruded. Mrs. Crater of “The Life” and Hulga Hopewell of “The Good Country People” are the surest candidates to fall victim to the fatal encounter with the devil-intruder travelling in many protean forms and names. Their revelatory moment of self-knowledge is hideous and final. All Mrs. Crater’s earthly possessions prove insubstantial; Hulga’s intellectual pride with her Ph. D. in Philosophy proves inane as well. Each, given the opportunity to recognize her self-deception through the fatal encounter with the devil, has the moment of truth, which may or may not effect her change of heart. As to the final condition of each of the two characters, O'Connor intends to leave it open to the reader’s choice. The one thing for sure is that the devil is again at large, “looking for someone to devour.” The modern landscape O'Connor presents is “a territory held largely by the devil” and the subject of her fiction is “the action of grace” in such a world.