In Flannery O 'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge'

Convergence and Coalescence in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge”
In “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor distorts the world through a lens of false moral righteousness and hypocrisy. In line with her work’s title, O’Connor posits acts of convergence, which I herein define as moments of impact where white and African American cultures attempt to bridge “the fence” of racial separation; but while O’Connor crafts such opportunities for realization, she deliberately conveys a lack of coalescence, the true integration of these cultures with the presence of empathy. Through the misguided motivations and limited vision of her characters, O’Connor dramatizes how social conditioning often confounds equality, with her characters resisting connection and understanding.
O’Connor consciously constructs both Julian Chestny and his mother to participants of convergence and yet incapable of coalescence because of their distortion of self and reality, in part because they live in a world that supports this pretense. From the outset of the story, O’Connor builds an inane world through Julian’s limited view. Julian and his mother set out into a sky of “dying violet,” the start of their journey to reduction marked by the ending of a what should be a beautiful bloom—this imparts an uncanny sense of foreclosure to a beginning (406). Here, O’Connor already portends that their style and approach to building

Old habits, customs, and histories do not die hard for they do not really die at all, and remain capable of thwarting bonds and upending moments where understanding can be gained. Ultimately, O’Connor’s commentary on coalescence has, ironically, already been stated by Julian’s mother: “’It takes time,’ she said, ‘and the world is in such a mess’”