Flannery O'Connor has creatively used negative figures of speech in her book. An example of a negative figure of speech in the book is when the writer describes the child's mother's face as "a broad and innocent as a cabbage." Another example is when she describes the grandmother's death as "half sat and half lay' Flannery uses this style to dehumanize her characters. The setting of the book is the deep rural south in the US, where racism is deep-rooted. The grandmother's use of derogative words like pickaninny and nigger shows that she is ignorant. She believes she is superior to everybody else.