Flannery O’Connor is a famous American author. She wrote thirty-two short stories and two novels. She is very famous for her short stories. One of her famous short stories is “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The short story is a relationship between son and mother, which also holds a mother’s and son’s perspective of colored people. To develop the short story, O’Connor uses different kinds of literature elements, such as, the main character—protagonist and antagonist—, main conflict and complication, third person omniscient point of view, symbolism, and irony, and the story is very complicated.
The main character Julian is the protagonist whose characteristic of being anti-racism is proven when he tries to teach and change his racist mother. He grew up in racist family, but he is not proud of them for what they did in the past, especially his slave-owning great grandfather. Perhaps more than any other quality, Julian’s thought process is not influenced by his family’s belief, whereas most of the …show more content…
In this story, a certain object, the hat, serves as a symbol for equality between white and colored people. Julian’s mother’s hat and the giant Negro woman’s hat are the same, so the identical hats describe black and white are equal which Julian mention at the end of the story. Another object, the penny. One Critic states, “The desire of giving the penny suggests a nexus of meanings relating to the social, racial and religious themes…” (Ower, John). For instance, the penny serves as a symbol for Julian’s mother racist attitude about black people describing she is better than them economically because the son’s mother says,” He does not take anybody’s penny!” Irony surfaces in the story where Julian, who is trying to teach his mother, and kills his own mother because of his bad words to her after she was slapped. I hope he learned from his terrible and horrible