Everything That Rises Must Converge

Everything That Rises Must Converge, collection of nine short stories by Flannery O’Connor, published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.

The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother’s prejudices. His smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice. Similarly, “The Comforts of Home” is about a self-styled intellectual who lives with his mother. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother instead of the petty criminal and self-confessed nymphomaniac the mother has taken in.

The other stories are “A View of the Woods,” “Parker’s Back,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Greenleaf,” “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Revelation,” and “Judgment Day.”