SOURCE: Napier, James J. “Flannery O'Connor's Last Three: ‘The Sense of an Ending’.” Southern Literary Journal 14, no. 2 (spring 1982): 19-27.

[In the following essay, Napier evaluates O'Connor's literary output in the last few years of her life, focusing on the achievement of her last three stories: “Revelation,” “Judgment Day,” and “Parker's Back.”]

“Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent.”

—Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 175.¹

A casual look at the record of Flannery O'Connor's career reveals a precocious beginning followed by an early success that was sustained for almost two decades until her death in 1964. From the publication of her first story in Accent when she was a student at the School for Writers at the State University of Iowa until the completion of “Parker's Back” in the last month of her life, she seems to have been unremittingly, if not exceptionally, productive. But this, as I say, is what a casual look reveals. A closer look, especially at the last half decade, gives a somewhat different impression.

O'Connor published her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, in January 1960. (Novels went slowly for her, Wise Blood having taken five, her second one seven, years). In addition, she had to her credit a volume of collected stories and four more published short stories. In the ensuing last quarter (nearly five years) of her career, she worked on a longer story, Why Do the Heathen Rage? (never completed), and five short stories: “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (early in 1961), “The Lame Shall Enter First” (early 1962), “Revelation” (late 1963), “Judgement Day” (1964), and “Parker's Back” (1964). Since the incomplete work, a fragment, has a marginal status in the O'Connor canon, the short stories invite more attention. A glance at their dates shows how comparatively slight her output was in this period.

But we have more than the dates to go on here. If we are to judge from the few comments about it in her letters, Why Do the Heathen Rage? did not tap O'Connor's deepest inspiration. She said of it on July 9, 1963: “[I] get on slowly if at all.”² Planned as a longer work, it may have intimidated her after a prolonged labor with two novels. She was, moreover, a reliable judge of her own work. Her letters show how initially enthusiastic she was about the stories that have enjoyed the highest critical praise, beginning with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and followed by “The Artificial Nigger,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Greenleaf,” and “Revelation.” Conversely, she seems to have been rightly dissatisfied with “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Comforts of Home,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” One should be wary of undue attention to her expressed likes and dislikes, however, for she said little about a number of other stories that are among her best. More significant is the fact that in a period of slackening output O'Connor was beginning to question her resources. As she wrote to a friend on May 4, 1963: “I've been writing eighteen years and I've reached the point where I can't do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing” (The Habit of Being, p. 518).

Consider her situation: after three and a half years, aside from “the work in progress,” so to speak (the longer story), she had completed two short stories, the second of them more than a year before. Her earlier story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” was the single work that pleased her. She had also begun to anticipate a second collection of stories, but found herself short of contributions. Four of them had been written in the preceding decade, another (“The Partridge Festival”) was a very early story and of doubtful rank here, and there were the two recent ones. As she had said to Robert Giroux on November 5, 1962: “I have seven stories but I don't think there is enough variety in them to make a good collection. I might as well wait and see what I come up with in the next year or two” (The Habit of Being, p. 498).

What she came up with, following her reduced output, her mood of reassessment, shows a recovery of power in a last trio that is arguably superior to most of the other stories in her posthumous collection. It would be too much to say they encompass “the larger things” she hoped for; it would be too little to say they are merely what she could “do well”; they fall somewhere between, and they provide the variety she needed. But most importantly they reinforce the sense of the “ultimate” that is so often central in her most memorable effects.

They are her final achievement, completed as her illness deepened. Let us admit that last stories may merely seem significant. Let us recognize that had she lived and her talent thrived, these stories may or may not have found an altered niche in a large body of work. The fact remains: they have an immediate interest for a number of reasons bearing upon their content as an ending, as a summation of this phase of her career.

They show, for example, aspects of technique that are surprisingly new for this writer known from her beginnings for technical orthodoxy. Second, they provide a variety of emphasis within her chosen tragicomic mode, a variety that yet offers, as I hope to indicate, a closing coherence of outlook. Third, they reveal a readiness to portray black characters more confidently, to have them speak more revealingly, and move a little closer to the center of her fictional stage. Together, they give proof of a talent that, even as death approached, was able to put a conclusive stamp of meaning on her last efforts.

If we are to connect these stories in this way, however, we should first note the order of their composition. “Revelation” was completed in November, 1963; “Parker's Back,” begun a few years earlier, was being completed in the last month of her life. The record is clear about these two, but concerning “Judgement Day” there is a slight ambiguity. As the last story in the published collection it bears in its placement and title a fitting touch of finality; yet O'Connor remarked in a letter, “I've got one [story] that I'm not satisfied with that I finished about the same time as ‘Revelation’” (The Habit of Being, p. 585). Sally Fitzgerald notes that “Parker's Back” and “Judgement Day” were “both completed when she was more or less in extremis” (The Habit of Being, p. 559). The apparent contradiction is resolved by assuming that “Judgement Day” required alterations in a way that “Revelation” (which appeared in Sewanee Review, Spring 1964) did not require, and that “Parker's Back” resisted a final draft for a prolonged period and then all at once fell into place.

“Revelation,” in my view, is the touchstone story of the three, one that throws a backward light on other stories but also a forward light on the last two, a story whose imaginative center can influence our reading of “Parker's Back” as an exuberantly comic story of youth and of “Judgement Day” as a darkly poignant story of old age. After “Revelation” we must reassess O'Connor's vision in the light of an implied declaration: something hitherto unspoken has been settled.

A hint of this can be seen in “Parker's Back,” with its page or two for the opening, and then a flashback, showing Parker in the days just prior to his marriage. Another flashback, this one within the first: Parker at age fourteen, awed by the tattooed man at the fair. End of second flashback, and a return to the first. But now, narrative convention calling her back to the time and place of her opening pages, O'Connor, risking a flaw, skips ahead from the first flashback, but over and beyond the opening “present,” ignoring it. She knew what she was about: it was deliberate, perhaps even a flaunting of skill, an easy mingling of past, present, future, and imbued with her high comic tone.

“Judgement Day” is more densely dependent on the flashback; only a fourth of the story treats the “present” in New York City. Here the complications of time make more demands on the reader's attention, with old Tanner's ruminations taking him back two days before, and from that to his days in the south with Coleman, and the appearance of the black “Doctor” Foley, on whose land Tanner was a squatter, and within that flashback another that cuts to his first meeting with Coleman, and then a return to the doctor, and then a return to the New York “present” (and not two days before, as the early pages suggest—but one cannot be sure)—all of this soon followed by the flashback with the black actor, the violent outcome, Tanner's stroke. Free of the past and the hold of memory, O'Connor in a few concluding pages brings Tanner to his painful end in the apartment stairwell.

Such unaccustomed attention to the flashback suggests that O'Connor's technical choices in this pair were running in parallel, with the past and the future seen in a wider perspective, one that she handled more flexibly in its applications.

Yet in another way the stories differ markedly. O'Connor has been labeled most often as a tragicomic artist. The label derives from the drama, and for the critic of fiction seems to have a useful but occasional importance. She is often called a comic artist and sometimes a tragic artist. But as Robert Fitzgerald suggested: “On the tragic scene, each time, the presence of her humor is like the presence of grace. Has not tragicomedy at least since Dante been the most Christian of genres?”³ “Tragicomic” accounts best for the doubleness of her effects. In “Parker's Back,” with its youth and robust humor, the mode tilts to comedy and can be said to be COMIC-tragic; but in “Judgement Day,” with its old age and confinement, the mode becomes TRAGIcomic. Providing extremes within the mode, these stories differ from “Revelation,” which occupies the middle ground in its balance of tragic and comic.

“Judgement Day” is a story she inevitably had to attempt, if for no other reason than to sketch the black characters she had so carefully avoided in the past. There is Coleman, poorest of the poor; there is Foley, the Southern landowner and businessman; the third is the nameless actor, the urbanized career-man in a mass society. The last of these is the least expected and the most remarkable, requiring as he does O'Connor's imaginative return to the New York she had left because of illness. Yet O'Connor, with her sure self-criticism, ranked this story below “Parker's Back” (The Habit of Being, p. 593), and there are at least two reasons why we should agree with her. One reason is that the flashback is overdone in “Judgement Day.” Since the purpose of a flashback is to provide necessary exposition and to prepare for a dramatically conclusive ending, proportion requires a substantial closing “present,” as in “Parker's Back.” In “Judgement Day” the closing seems brief after the long attention to memory. A second limitation is that the language lacks the inspiration and imagination so evident in the brilliantly comic “Parker's Back,” a story at once funny, serious, bizarre, and convincing.

Relative success aside, each story makes its way, starting with a common experience that is for the protagonist at once a beginning and a preparation. The experience is that of humiliation. For O'Connor it seems necessary to subject her characters to this fall from inveterate complacency. For Parker the agent is Sarah Ruth, who applies her broom to his head. For Tanner it is the enraged actor. For Ruby Turpin it is Mary Grace. Something in O'Connor urged her first to bring a character low, for in other stories (among her most effective), we note humiliation: that of the family in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; Mr. Head's with Nelson in “The Artificial Nigger”; Hulga's in the barnloft in “Good Country People”; Mrs. May's in “Greenleaf.” From such humiliation may or may not follow the enlightenment to effect a change, but the ground of change, a chastening, is surely present, and the story's ending makes us ponder its import.

Of endings and their effects, Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, quotes George Eliot: “‘Beginnings are always troublesome … and conclusions are the weak point of most authors.’” Eliot adds: “… some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.”⁴ But as Kermode responds: “Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent.”

The most “transfiguring” end among O'Connor's stories appears in “Revelation.” Ruby Turpin's vision as she hoses the swine in the pig parlor offers a conclusion that not only illuminates the content of one story; by its very nature it plies backward and forward in significance, a fictional-theological “given” that refuses to be confined. This is her vision of the twilight sky

… as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.⁵

Ruby Turpin, whose righteousness has earlier been assailed by the hurled book, and worse, by the stinging insult by Mary Grace (“Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog”), sees that she and her husband Claud are joined in that assembly, but as part of the tribe that brings up the rear, and with “shocked and altered faces” as “even their virtues were being burned away.” Upward they go, this visionary flock, singing in the light that fades, with Ruby and Claud and their like (the “respectable” ones) alone on key, but all of them “climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

This ending, in keeping with the prophetic thrust of O'Connor's themes, is first of all apocalyptic, an aspect, I think, that can easily be exaggerated. More to the point is the explicitness of Ruby Turpin's vision. Unlike other scenes in O'Connor's stories with a visionary element—Asbury's sick-bed experience of the Holy Ghost in “The Enduring Chill,” or Tarwater and his “friend” in the wood at the close of The Violent Bear It Away, to name two examples—unlike these scenes with their implicitly subjective side, this story projects a vision that is a revelation—explicit, objective, and absolute, a hierarchical image of eternity.

The biblical source at the core of this vision has been a part of the critical record for some years.⁶ Ruby's vision may be read as a literal depiction of the gospel message: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Matthew 19:30). Critics who share O'Connor's theological outlook have no problem with such a reading. But others have found it troublesome. As Josephine Hendin says: “Everyone … goes to heaven.”⁷ And Joyce Carol Oates has written: “This is the most powerful of O'Connor's revelations, because it questions the very foundations of our assumptions of the ethical life.”⁸

Whatever the critical stand, there is a tendency to see Ruby's vision as a set piece, with attention only to its immediate effect on the character and none to its larger implications for the practice of O'Connor's art. Neither the orthodox noting of the source of the vision nor the extravagant—and misleading—approaches of Hendin and Oates seems adequate to the outcome here. Is it necessary to point out that Hendin is wrong? O'Conner does not say that everyone goes to heaven. The irony in the passage, at Ruby's expense, depends on the reversal of the white-black, sane-lunatic, middle-lower social expectations that she has lived by. The ranks of the souls shouting hallelujah would have to include many a “sinner” (in the Dantean sense) to justify Hendin's conclusion. And Oates overlooks the point at issue, which is Ruby's pride and complacency, her spiritual near-sightedness. Finally, however one “judges” Ruby—sternly or charitably—seems not to matter: she is saved.

If then Ruby and her like are saved, the import of the revelation, as compared to other endings in O'Connor's work, should prompt reflection. It is this that I would like to stress and not merely the “facts” of the ending. Nothing in the story casts doubt on how we are to understand the vision: it is clearly authentic—especially so because it is not self-justifying on Ruby's part; on the contrary, it is in part a reversal of a life-long assumption. The effect goes a step beyond the assertion of authorial omniscience; it is a uniquely didactic effect.

O'Connor has dared in this late story to present a spiritual flash-forward: the invisible is made visible. This is the real departure in “Revelation,” but one that derives from what at first seems only an innocuous technical innovation, a fortuitously symmetrical countering of the flashbacks in “Parker's Back” and “Judgement Day.” It is more than that, for to use Kermode's words, it does “frankly transfigure the events in which [it is] immanent.” And through the association of its radical import, it casts an altering light on its two companion stories in time—on the natural ambiguity at the close of “Parker's Back,” with Parker crying “like a baby” under the pecan tree in frustration and defeat; and on the violent end of old Tanner even as he o'erleaps in spirit his brutal handling by the black man. It is an ending in which the message rings: Look up all ye who pray and hope and do your work—see what a goal awaits you!

The ending of “Revelation” erases ambiguity. Could Ruby, upon reflection, come to doubt her vision? That would go against the grain of the story. If the ending of Anna Karenina, as Kermode points out in support of his thesis, “recapitulates the domestic beginning”⁹ (“All happy families are alike …”) with Levin now in the midst of his own happy family, so too is Ruby's visionary glimpse of her last end immanent in her impulsive cry in the doctor's waiting room: “Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!”¹⁰ Ill-conceived some of Ruby's views and actions may be; the author is yet clearly for her, not against her.

The ending can be taken a step further. It is arguable that two sides contended in O'Connor's work. One was an austere and satiric, an unforgiving side, perceived by many readers; the second was a more charitable and humanizing side, less prominent and less readily noted. Many of her stories, beginning with Wise Blood and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” support the first side, but an important handful differ: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Parker's Back,” “Judgement Day,” and “Revelation.” The impulse that lightened O'Connor's severity, especially in the first two of this group, dominates in the last one, wherein a covert vision of eternity (the “invisible”) in becoming overt inescapably sheds benign retrospective light on earlier stories as well as associatively on the closing three. For how is one to limit, fictionally, the “vision” of Ruby Turpin? She and her husband Claud are of the country types that inhabit O'Connor's stories. Like the murdered grandmother, the ill-fated Mrs. May, Mr. Head, and others—those “accountable … for good order and common sense and respectable behavior”—they have lived their “average” lives. When O'Connor dared to represent an “otherworldly” moment for the Turpins, she disclosed as it were her foundation of the “off-stage” divine, and in that single gesture, unique for her, embraced Parker and old Tanner too, and gave an ending that transfigured more “events” than she may have guessed.

Notes

1. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 175.

2. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), p. 529.

3. Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), Introduction, xxxiii.

4. Kermode, p. 174.

5. “Revelation,” in Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), pp. 217.

6. See Robert Drake, Flannery O'Connor, Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective Series (Grand Rapids, 1966), p. 31.

7. Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O'Connor (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), p. 30.

8. Joyce Carol Oates, “The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor,” in New Heaven, New Earth (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1974), p. 174.

9. Kermode, p. 175.

10. “Revelation,” in Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 206.