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Flannery O Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge

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Flannery O Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge
"True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said and tapped his head, "the mind."
"It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things is because of who you are."
The webboard postings referencing the Flannery O'Connor short story "Everything That Rises Must Converge" bear a strong relationship to the above mentioned mini-debate between the characters Julian and his mother. Utilizing the devices of setting, point of view, and round characterization to propel her plot forward, O'Connor elicits strong responses from readers regarding what they believe the theme of the story to be and once identified, how they interpret it. These reactions reflect the students' own "themes of the self" (David Mial, Empowering the Reader) and demonstrate "the limitations of [their] habitual concepts and ways of thinking" (Mial-Kuiken: Overview) of the readers. The students in their assessment of the text; both address whether true culture lies …show more content…
For example, Dan Fowler thinks that the mother views giving the "black child a penny as * [giving] an animal a bit of food". Lizette Gill states, "Julian's mother hated minorities". And Jennifer Bonazzo makes an even wider interpretation by stating, "Julian's mother actually believed that the sickening prejudice that blinded her whole sense of humanity was for God." None of the preceding quotations are supported explicitly in the text and seem to be coming from a prior conventional mode of thinking regarding racism, which pre-existed in the minds of the readers and was triggered by the characters in the story. Few specific examples were given to validate the racism of Julian and his mother, which seems to indicate that the racism was blatantly obvious. What was not so obvious to most of the respondents were the class structure issues that a few felt the story was really
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