Flannery O'Connor and the Nature Term Paper

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He then utters the story's baffling last line, "It's no real pleasure in life" (O'Connor 1955b, 456). Thus, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" can be read as something of the inverse, or parallel, parable to "Good Country People": In the former, nihilism, or the absence of belief, wins out over faith, despite the Misfit's ugly admonition that his anti-programmatic perception of the world is ultimately not firm enough for anyone to rest on. While in "Good Country People," that nihilism is shattered - not by faith, but again, by false faith, which, O'Connor implies, Joy really should have been intelligent enough to detect; had her intellect been tempered with belief of some sort, perhaps she would have.

At the heart of "Everything That Must Rises Must Converge" is a conflict in perception between the two main characters, a mother and son. The son, a highly educated, intelligent young man, believes strongly in social progress. In the course of the narrative, which details a bus trip that the two take to the local Y shortly after integration has taken place, the son watches resentfully as his mother behaves in a racist, yet hypocritical fashion towards African-Americans. Her entire belief system is rooted in the past - in the son's eyes, "the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn" (O'Connor n.d.) in the end of the story, she gets a rude awakening when the mother of a black child to whom she was condescendingly giving a penny punches her in the face, literally shattering her belief system, as the son looks on, satisfied.

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But his smug beliefs in liberal ideals are also challenged in the last lines of the story, when it becomes evident that his mother may die from her injuries.

The message of this, as with O'Connor's other stories, seems to be that belief, when supported by self-righteousness, is no alternative to nihilism. As she wrote in one of her occasional writings, "At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily" (O'Connor 1972). For O'Connor, belief was not merely the engine for her own perception, but for that of her characters as well. By constantly subjecting them to that border separating belief from nihilism, she reveals a higher truth about the human condition, while posing a serious challenge to those who support both their faith and their nihilism with righteousness, which, as a Catholic writer, O'Connor considered to be the root of evil in this world.

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