Flannery O' Connor Stories The centr

The central conflict of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is located in the tension between Julian, a frustrated intellectual, and his mother, a bigoted incarnation of Old South values. The story, which is told in the limited omniscient point-of-view, identifies Julian as a weak young man whose goal of writing has been ironically displaced by selling typewriters; he is static, unproductive, ostensibly self-aware, and he knows that there is "of course no future ahead of him." (491) He is heavily invested in a self-perception that insists he has cut himself off from the prejudice and banal values of his mother: he thinks that he has "cut himself emotionally free of her... he [is] not dominated by his mother." (492)

The reader, however, comes to just the opposite conclusion. Julian, an adult, lives with his mother; he allows himself to be guilted into a host of small annoying favors, like the weekly Wednesday night escort to the Y. (485) Even in his imagination, when he is dreaming about living as a monied and competent professional, he defers to her: "'Someday I'll start making money,' Julian said gloomily--he knew he never would--'and you can have one of those jokes [hats] whenever you take the fit.'"(486) Moreover, on the bus when Julian contemplates a small act of rebellion (letting his mother get off at her stop alone), he helplessly admits to himself that he will return to get her. (493)

The theme of domination is consistently imaged in

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ou had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to come out!" (554) Asbury directly attributes his lack of talent and his lackluster writing projects to his mother's incapacity to see him as he really is. Even when he thinks death is imminent, he pounces on any opportunity to hurt his mother, in order to point her deliberately to her own provincialism and racism. Yet all of these rebellious gestures ironically backfire: the priest Father Finn turns out to be the boorish opposite of the literary Jesuit Asbury had imagined (565); the black hired hands whom he tries to befriend prove willfully dense and irritating (569); and the unpasteurized milk he drinks turns out to be the very source of the medical condition that will perpetuate his miserable existence. (572) The uneducated literal-minded mother does not understand depression; she can only observe that "the more education [her children] got, the less they could do." (551) She privately diagnoses her son's illness as a silly self-indulgence that would dramatically improve if he would only come work in the sunshine and fresh air of the dairy. (551) The reader discovers that her domination over Asbury has been real, a tyranny of indulgence. Randall, the dairy hand,

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