Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Flannery O'Connor once said “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.” But to many readers this may sound very ironic. This perspective may be easily picked up by readers seeing how she is very unsympathic towards the characters; she made all her characters who eventually are led to their own down fall very proud people; but yet places them in a very physiologically vulnerable position and claiming that they are ungrateful for the grace around them. Her stories also surrounds strongly around a shredding of falsehood in a form of accepting, and embracing defeat, or humility; but she also gives no chance of a redemption for the by ending most of the stories with the characters cornered into a state of complete breakdown. The stories also contain a many heavily enforced Christian ideology and morals, and with the brutality she enforces these moralise it no surprise that reader may see her as a twisted and aggressive bible basher.

Her unsympathic attitude towards the characters in her stories could be seen in the way she structured that characters, situation, and the environment they’re in. She often structures the character to be very proud, and the pride of these people would not allow them to admit defeat or loss to the situation; but would instead continue to infest itself in the characters’ minds making putting them in to a false reality that they are somehow more superior then people surrounding them, by certain attributes such as their social class, race, knowledge, or heritage. Example of character like these would be Julian and his mother in her story “Everything Rises Must Converge” Julian mother was finds pride in what her grandfather was; and she finds herself to be fragile in the present state of the world for what it had changed into; but was unwilling to show her weakness to people around her. As for Julian his problem was that he was a failure to a certain extent, considering that he was a grown man still living off his mother; but yet he feels the need to not be overpower by his mother, but was unable to do so in any other but to do so by judging her judgement and, behaviour towards the African Americans. In it which ultimately led him to his and her downfall, when physically and mentally broke down and presumably dies; and at this point when he finally defeated her, he fears that he might lose her, and realizes that he loves her, and regrets that he had spent more time judging her than showing his love for her. Form these two characters we could see these two characters were simply ingredients to create catastrophe, and she doesn’t even leave the smallest sense of hope for the characters; but yet she claims that there has been grace acted upon these characters, she simply used her stories to get a Christian message across.

O’Conner’s writings are also often usual amount of raw violence, and brutality, just to get a point to the readers. The most obvious example of her usage of brutality is shown in her story “A View of the Woods”. A story about the relationship between a grandfather and his granddaughter Mary Fortune, though the start of the story seemed fairly clam; but like other short stories of this collection a tension was created and roses to a point of breakdown. In this story the grandfather thought himself to be a kind of a visionary who could bring improvement and change to the local area, and like other in the story he is overly excessively vain, but he fears