O'Connor, Flannery - Susanna Gilbert (essay date spring 1999)
Susanna Gilbert (essay date spring 1999)
SOURCE: Gilbert, Susanna. “‘Blood Don't Lie’: The Diseased Family in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Literature and Medicine 18, no. 1 (spring 1999): 114-31.
[In the following essay, Gilbert investigates the way in which O'Connor's illness informs her last collection of short fiction, Everything That Rises Must Converge.]
Storytelling seems to be a natural reaction to illness. … Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.
—Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness
Asbury lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot. “Slowly Lord but sure,” Block sang in a murmuring voice, “Oh slowly Lord but sure.” When the syringe was full, he withdrew the needle. “Blood don't lie,” he said.
—Flannery O'Connor, “The Enduring...
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