In the short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, the author Flannery O’Connor uses copious amounts of irony, imagery, and characters in a sort of comedy of errors to hold the reader’s attention and keep him or her interested, while understanding the meaning of the story: the brain creates the inability to detect when they are being hypocritical, or subconsciously exercising prejudice. While O’Connor makes the plot of the story rather simple, the true meaning of the story proves far more complex, dealing with generation-gaps, particularly the inability of the mother, and many other white people, to accept the African-Americans as more than second-class citizens.
The characters in the story are invaluable to understanding the meaning.…