A dimension taken away is one thing; a dimension added is another. --Flannery O'Connor, Fiction Writer and His origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures, writes cultural historian Lewis Hyde, require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt very things that culture is based (9). In his excellent study Trikster Makes This World (1998), Hyde joins a long and distinguished line of critics examining archetypal trickster-figure in world mythologies: a figure of mischievous disruption characterized by rule-breaking, lies, theft, shape-shifting, and wordplay; a citizen of contingencies and thresholds who, while subverting and denigrating existing orders, paradoxically thereby allows for a creative reanimation and restoration of social and metaphysical order. The fraternity of trickster-figures is a familiar one in folklore and myth: Hermes in Greek antiquity, Chinese Monkey King, Norse prankster Loki and East Africa's spider-god Anansi (transformed in American Gulla dialect to folkloric Aunt Nancy), Native American figures of Coyote and Raven, Yoruba Eshu and Maori trickster Maui, to mention just a few. From Puck to Prometheus, pervasiveness of this image in human narrative suggests its centrality as an emblem for redemptive chaos and transformative disorder. Although Flannery O'Connor's short fiction has long been anchored in genre of Christian allegory, I believe that viewing her works through lens of this archetype can expand received readings of her fiction. It may offer new insights as well into O'Connor's unique blend of comedy and corruption that characterizes her rendition of evil in world. Specifically, her caricatures of Lucifer in four of her more allegorical stories of 1950s--Tom Shiftlet in Life You Save May Be Your Own, Manley Pointer in Country People, The Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Powell Boyd in A Circle in Fire-- share much with folkloric figure of Trickster, not merely in their individual aspects as agents of chaos, but in paradoxically redemptive function they perform. Such folkloric and mythic elements in O'Connor have so far received scant critical attention. Of various genre studies, only one extended work --Ruthann Knechel Johansen's The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter (1994)--takes up at any length figure of trickster in O'Connor. However, I believe Johansen's depiction of this archetypal figure manages to be on one hand too broad, and on other too benign. In context of a narratological analysis of O'Connor's prose, Johansen associates tricksters with interpreters: Hebraic prophets, mediators, inspired newsbearers, and facilitators who are always on side of human beings (31)--and ultimately she sees trickster as an emblem of narrative act itself, a psychic embodiment of the ironic imagination. While hermeneutically interesting, this more benevolent expansion of archetype downplays much of disruptive, purposeless, and chaotic nature of both mythic trickster and O'Connor's use of him. Far from being a Christlike seducer or helpful reconciler of conflicts (31), Trickster classically functions far more dynamically as principle of disorder, a catalyst for subversion and loss. He is border breaker, outlaw, anomaly; deceiver and trick player, shape-shifter and situation-inverter; sacred messenger and lewd bricoleur(1)--one who, according to Joseph Campbell, doesn't respect values that you've set up for yourself, and smashes them (qtd in Hynes and Doty 1). While Johansen does capture essential ambiguity of this figure and acknowledges his havoc-wreaking as a ritual of renewal, in many ways her reading, when applied to O'Connor's fiction, becomes overly inclusive of all ironic or indeterminate figures. …