O'Connor, Flannery - Robert D. Denham (essay date Autumn 1975)
Robert D. Denham (essay date Autumn 1975)
SOURCE: "The World of Guilt and Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's 'Everything That Rises Must Converge,'" in The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, Vol. IV, Autumn, 1975, pp. 42-51.
[In the following essay, Denham discusses O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" as a journey towards Julian's growth, and asserts that the bus scene serves to make Julian unsympathetic and provides the means for the story's climax.]
"In the act of writing," says Flannery O'Connor, "one sees that the way a thing is made controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change." She adds that unless the reader "is able, in some degree, to apprehend the form, he will never apprehend anything else about the work, except what is extrinsic to it as literature." These statements imply a neatly capsulated set of principles for one kind of critical inquiry,...
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