O'Connor, Flannery - David Jauss (essay date Winter 1988)
David Jauss (essay date Winter 1988)
SOURCE: "Flannery O'Connor's Inverted Saint's Legend," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 76-8.
[In the following essay, Jauss asserts that in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" the name of the protagonist is an allusion to St. Julian Hospitator, and that "By subtly calling our attention to St. Julian and the story of his life, O'Connor transforms this story of a tragic bus trip to the Y into an ironic, inverted saint's legend."]
As many critics have noted, Flannery O'Connor's stories are populated with characters who bear symbolic names. Many of these names are so overtly symbolic that we wouldn't be surprised to encounter them in an allegory by Bunyan or Spenser: witness, among the many examples, Joy, Mrs. Hopewell, and Mrs. Freeman from "Good Country People"; Mr. Paradise from "The River"; Mr. Fortune from "A View of the Woods"; Sheppard from "The Lame Shall Enter...
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