World view of Flannery O'Connor

The world view of Flannery O'Connor is profoundly religious, and from the facts of her life it is no great leap of insight to note that her religious view is profoundly Catholic. A strong concept of the consequences of sin and the inescapability of accountability for it permeates "Everything That Rises Must Converge." To fail to take the divine seriously is the deepest of sins, and retribution may strike in any form because of that sin. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the sin is in a failure of convergence with what is ultimate about life, and that not addressing this problem of life carries the most terrible of consequences. On this view, since all of human life is the province of God, God's justice may strike in any form and certainly not at human beings' convenience. Thus Julian, in "Everything That Rises Must Converge," is deprived of the mother he thinks he hates and is obliged in a sudden moment to prepare to face life without her. The suspense and consequence to Julian, which are absolute and irrevocable, are held until the final line of the story.

The action of "Everything" is simple and straightforward. In the early 1960s in the South, an adult young man, Julian, who has better things to do accompanies his mother on a bus ride to her exercise class. As they leave the bus, the mother makes an unwelcome, patronizing fuss over a young black boy who is with his own mother. When the black boy's mother responds angrily and stalks off, Julian is amused and his m

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r his mother's benefit. When for example she says that "if you know who you are you can go anywhere," Julian responds, "Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are" (O'Connor 1283). This is meant as his declaration of cynical realism about the face of adversity, an expression of the emotional independence that he has convinced himself he has acquired. But it is clear that in the depths of his soul Julian desperately longs for the status and ease of the Godhighs. Indeed, in this regard, Julian is at his most winsome when he responds to his mother's statement that if she and he were half white, they would have "mixed feelings" about the mess that integration has made of Southern society. "I have mixed feelings now," Julian says (O'Connor 1284), and in that statement reveals far more than he knows about his psychological and spiritual emptiness and confusion. What becomes clear as the narrative progresses is that Julian is more like his mother, and far more sensitive to the experience of genteel poverty, than he is prepared to admit, even to himself. In this characteristic, which very much dominates his life, he resembles Mathilde Loisel in Maupassant's "The N

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