In modern fiction, writers have combined the aesthetics of the novel and the short story to construct grouping of interrelated stories that are too finely patterned to be described as a mere collection of stories and too dependent on individual components to be described as a novel. Among the names proposed for this new genre, Forrest Ingram's suggestion of "short story cycle" in Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century most clearly represents its nature. He defines a short story cycle as "a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader's successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts." In this hybrid, writers combine the essential differences between the short story and the novel: each individual story within a cycle focuses upon a single moment of peculiar significance in the life of its protagonist, yet the sequence of stories traces a number of peak moments in a series of events.

Even though critical treatments of short story cycles have generally failed to illuminate their complex interrelationships, they have recognized that such obvious structural patterns as recurring characters or settings establish that the stories of a collection are interconnected. For example, it is apparent that the recurrence of Aram in Saroyan's My Name Is Aram and Fidelman in Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman groups together these stories just as the common locale of Dublin in Joyce's Dubliners and New Orleans in Cable's Old Creole Days links those collections. In the spectrum of the short story cycle genre, however, Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge represents the type of series of interconnected stories whose strands of unity are least apparent. Amidst the diversity of characters and settings that comprise the book, O'Connor, like Kafka in A Hunger Artist and Camus in Exile and the Kingdom, ties together the stories through similarly treated themes and motifs.

O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge poses additional difficulty because of the misconception surrounding its composition. Published posthumously in 1965, the standard edition consists of nine stories. Shortly before her death in 1964, however, O'Connor wrote to her publisher proposing that the book contain eight stories, one of which, "The Partridge Festival," she ultimately withdrew. While Robert Giroux, her publisher, and Robert Fitzgerald, her literary executor, fulfilled her intention in this instance, upon discovering two stories she had been working on shortly before her death, they seem to have disregarded her plan for the collection by adding them as the eighth and ninth stories, "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day." Any attempt to discuss the book as a cycle, therefore, must assume that it is composed of only the first seven stories. Fitzgerald has since admitted the validity of such an assumption and illuminated O'Connor's cyclic intention by acknowledging that she had planned the order of the seven stories in the collection and intended it for publication in that order. A consideration of the relationship of the excluded story and the two added stories to the cycle, however, can reinforce an understanding of the distinctive interconnecting strands grouping together the seven included stories.

Since most critics of the book have not been aware of O'Connor's intention, they have regarded Everything That Rises Must Converge as a collection of nine rather than seven stories and thus failed to consider the actual make-up of the work itself. Of the seven book-length studies on O'Connor, for example, only one author, Josephine Hendrin, seems to have known of this misconception. Hendrin, however, discusses only six of the stories as a group, for she treats "The Lame Shall Enter First" in a chapter on The Violent Bear It Away. Nevertheless, with only two exceptions critics have not even considered the nine stories as a series of interconnected pieces; one typical critical observation summarizes the prevailing attitude to the collection: "The nine stories … have some common concerns. There are similarities in theme, method, and characterization among them, as there are resemblances to earlier works. But the similarities strike me less than the distinctive qualities of each story as an entity."

That O'Connor did not arrange the seven stories chronologically according to the date of their composition or publication shows that she brought them together to illuminate or comment upon one another through juxtaposition or association. Each of the seven had been published previously in magazines over a period of eight years: "Greenleaf" in 1956; "A View of the Woods" in 1957; "The Enduring Chill" in 1958; "The Comforts of Home" in 1960; "Everything That Rises Must Converge" in 1961; "The Lame Shall Enter First" in 1962; "Revelation" in 1964. In bringing together these stories for the cycle, O'Connor seems to have aimed for a much looser structure than, for example, Faulkner intended in The Unvanquished, for unlike him she did not revise any of the stories to make their interconnectedness more apparent. Instead, she seems to have viewed "Revelation," both the final story in the cycle and the last one written, as reiterating and concluding the patterns of thematic concern developed throughout the first six stories.

The parallel compositional history of O'Connor's other short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, which also can be considered a cycle, indicates that the process of arrangement in Everything That Rises Must Converge was not accidental. In the earlier work, O'Connor also arranged already-published stories in a significant order, the opening story bearing the same title as the cycle, and the final story, "The Displaced Person," strategically placed to conclude themes raised throughout the previous pieces. One critic, Burke, notes that like Joyce's Dubliners "the order of the stories is meaningful in both of Miss O'Connor's collections." O'Connor's own description of her writing habits while working on the first of her two novels, Wise Blood, can perhaps partly explain the process by which two unified cycles emerged from stories already written on similar themes: "I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." Whether or not Wise Blood can even be considered a novel has been questioned by some on the grounds that it is too episodic and fragmentary. O'Connor herself stated: "I am not writing a conventional novel." Melvin Friedman regards it as more a "tightly knit collection of stories" than a conventional novel:

Four of the fourteen chapters were earlier published separately, which reinforces the sense of short stories being strung together to form a novel. The first edition, published by Harcourt, Brace, in fact leaves blank pages between chapters almost begging that we come to a complete endstop before proceeding to the next division.

Although more conventionally constructed, O'Connor's second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, contains a strong picaresque element and was also reshaped from shorter fiction published earlier. While most critics indicate that such observations on the episodic quality of her novels and their compositional history indicate that O'Connor was essentially a short story writer and not a novelist, those descriptions also point to O'Connor's affinity for the cyclic method of structuring.

One of the most salient means for penetrating the structural unity of Everything That Rises Must Converge lies in exploring the implications of its title. On one level the title can simply refer to O'Connor's classical method of constructing her stories through the rising action of conflict between two characters who either converge or collide at the climax of the story. The title contains far richer implications, however, for it refers to the convergence or collision throughout the seven stories of the rising Southern Blacks with white Southerners, the rising lower class with the upper class, and the rising younger generation with the older generation. But even these explanations do not approach the central underlying implication. The title comes from the writings of the French Jesuit theologian-scientist-poet, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom O'Connor greatly admired. For example, when asked by the editors of The American Scholar in 1961 to single out "what … were the outstanding books of the past three decades," O'Connor designated Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man with this comment:

It is a search for human significance in the evolutionary process. Because Teilhard is both a man of science and a believer, the scientist and the theologian will require considerable time to sift and evaluate his thought, but the poet, whose sight is essentially prophetic, will at once recognize in Teilhard a kindred intelligence. His is a scientific expression of what the poet attempts to do: penetrate matter until spirit is revealed in it. Teilhard's vision sweeps forward without detaching itself at any point from the earth.

Teilhard's vision seems to correspond with O'Connor's, for the central element of each centers around belief in a world penetrated by spirit. In his evolutionary system Teilhard sees the continuing movement of diverse species into higher and higher forms of consciousness until, ultimately, they combine or converge upon one another at what he calls the Omega Point, the stage at which spirit and matter exist in equal proportion and blend together as one. According to Teilhard, the individual must grow from egoism to self-awareness and love for human history to evolve toward Omega:

To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance—towards the "other!" The goal of ourselves, the acme of our originality is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same law holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to "egoism."

In this rejection of egoism as limiting being, Teilhard emphasizes man's capacity through love to rise to higher levels of consciousness where psychic convergences with others can transform the universe: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourself united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

Throughout the seven stories of the cycle O'Connor dramatizes this struggle of rising to higher consciousness by focusing on characters whose egoism distorts their perception, blinding them to the transforming power of the divine at work in the world. Declaring that "for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ," O'Connor expresses her Catholic world view of man's need for the sudden manifestation of grace offered the protagonists in the cycle by including physical sickness in each story to emphasize the disease of spiritual emptiness. Ironically, however, the potential moment of epiphany does not usually trigger self-awareness, for the narrow-minded, self-righteous protagonists of all but the final story collide rather than converge with this possibility for growth; instead of recognizing their tainted nature and participating in a collective effort to transform the secular into an ultimately divine order, they rationalize to maintain their self-righteous pose in a profane existence that serves as a microcosm for their Godless world. The successive exploration of this pattern in varying contexts from story to story provides a structural basis for the cycle.

It is principally through her use of point of view that O'Connor manages to avoid mere repetition with this pattern in the seven stories. Using indirect interior monologue much as Jane Austen did, she in a sense perches on top of the shoulders of the protagonist of a story in order to approximate the workings of the character's mind; the subtle shifting from objective narration to a character's idiom allows her to penetrate, throughout the cycle, the grotesque irony of the protagonist who reveals the self-righteous obsession with which he unknowingly confronts the world. The opening of "The Comforts of Home" illustrates this technique: "Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his hands between the wall and the curtain he looked down on the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the little slut were getting out of it." The objective description of the narrator in the first sentence subtly switches to Thomas's indirect interior monologue in the second sentence through the use of the derogatory phrase describing the girl his mother is bringing home; the cumulative effect of similar passages characterizes the pseudo-intellectual arrogance with which Thomas confronts reality. Throughout the cycle self-inflation manifests itself especially in the tension between generations in a number of ways: intellectually, socially, racially, morally, and religiously. O'Connor varies this basic situation in each story by shifting the location of her point of view from one generation to the other in successive stories in order to examine fully the dimensions of this recurrent pattern. For example, in "Everything That Rises Must Converge," she tells the story through the indirect interior monologue of a son in conflict with his mother; and in the next story, "Greenleaf," she shifts the point of view to a mother whose relationship with her sons and reality corresponds to that of the mother of the first story. This shifting of point of view from parent to child occurs in the succeeding stories until, in the final one, "Revelation," the point of view centers on a third person who observes and is affected by the conflict between a mother and daughter.

The opening story of the cycle, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," establishes some of the basic trademarks of O'Connor's fiction: the vivid use of color in the description of Julian's mother's hat to emphasize the grotesque quality of a character; the Southern setting in which the sound of idioms, speech patterns, and clichés capture the flavor of the region; the dramatic opening in the midst of an action whose background is not filled in until later in the story; the relentless use of verbal, dramatic, and situational irony to tear apart the protagonist's facade of pious respectability; and the building toward a carefully foreshadowed violent climax often resulting in death. The story, however, also introduces the character types, the technical use of parallelism or twinning, and the thematic conflicts present particularly throughout this cycle.

The parasitic relationship between Julian and his mother establishes the prototype for parent and child figures in subsequent stories. College educated, Julian prides himself on his cultural sophistication, racial liberalism, and ability to perceive his mother's genteel affectation and racial paternalism. Realizing that the governing principle of his mother's fantasy world "was to sacrifice herself for him after she had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things," he revels in the thrill of his own self-assurance that in spite of her he has "turned out so well":

In spite of going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come out with a first-rate education; in spite of growing up dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was not dominated by his mother.

Ironically, however, Julian's pompous assumptions prove to be only self-deceptions, for his every action reflects his dependence on his mother. To maintain his delusion while still living with his mother who partly supports him until he can become a successful writer, he fabricates a martyr role that allows him to comply with his mother's ways and yet think he remains aloof from them. The ludicrous quality of his rationalizing is revealed when the narrator describes him awaiting his mother's departure in the opening with "his hands behind him,… pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him." While accompanying her to the YWCA his attention is consumed by the petty need to annoy her in every way possible: he mocks her class pretensions by removing his necktie and taunts her segregationist views by going out of his way to move to a seat on the bus next to a Negro. When he imagines means by which he might capitalize on her bigotry to "teach her a lesson," he reveals his sterile imagination as well as his own deep-rooted racism by resorting to such hypothetical clichés of white racism as the horror of being treated by a Negro doctor or of intermarriage. Throughout his fantasies his own racial hostility emerges as even more dehumanizing than his mother's, for he prides himself on favoring integration while she at least admits that she does not. His liberal facade discloses that he is concerned with the racial question only insofar as it confirms his misanthropic self-righteousness: racial "injustice in daily operation" gives "him a certain satisfaction," for it confirms "his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles." And while he outwardly scorns his mother's dream of her ancestral mansion, he secretly longs for the leisure life rooted in the institution of slavery that it represents.

Although Julian's mother's moral platitudes reflect her small-mindedness and her suffocating love contributes to her son's immaturity, she has a clearer understanding of the world she lives in. In uncanny fashion she often makes statements that contain more truth than she realizes. For example, without realizing the degree to which Julian is still dependent on her, she says he "didn't yet know a thing about 'life,' that he hadn't even entered the real world." Even though she appears more sympathetic juxtaposed to Julian, O'Connor's tone never becomes sentimental, for the mother's obsession with respectability and pride in her genealogy cripple her efficacy as an individual and parent.

The dramatic conflict of the story builds toward its climax through O'Connor's paralleling of objects and persons. When a Negro woman and child board a bus, Julian becomes elated when he realizes that she is wearing the same hideous hat as his mother who had earlier prided herself on its being one of a kind. O'Connor emphasizes her twinning intent by repeating the exact description of Julian's mother's hat in particularizing the grotesqueness of the Negro woman's: "A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out." In addition to the hat, the two mothers parallel each other in that both are overweight, concerned for their own son's welfare, and insensitive to each other—the one through hate and the other through condescension. When the woman sits by Julian and her son sits by his mother, Julian sees that symbolically they "had in a sense, swapped sons." Dumbfounded, he can hardly believe that "Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson." After his mother's paternalistic offering of the penny precipitates her violent confrontation with the Negro woman, Julian makes sure that she understands her lesson by explaining its meaning even though her shocked state increases the susceptibility to a stroke, given her high blood pressure:

"Don't think that was just an uppity Negro woman," he said. "That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double…. What all this means," he said, "is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn."

The confrontation, however, proves both psychologically and physically too jarring to lead her to a higher level of self-awareness, for as she collapses she reverts back to her childhood plantation life whose passing she had never accepted. Ironically, then, Julian learns that the lesson has proven costly, for as he bends over her crumpled body his dependence surfaces in the childlike manner in which he addresses her: "Darling, sweetheart"; "Mamma, Mamma." The full implications of O'Connor's technique of twinning now become apparent: just as the parallelism with the Negro woman shattered Julian's mother's social pretensions, so, too, does the parallelism with a four-year-old child disclose Julian's hidden dependence. Both childishly attempt against their mother's wishes to gain the attention of a person of the opposite race and, in a sense, exchange mothers when they sit beside the other's mother on the bus. The "mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him" (italics mine) bursts, leaving Julian alone with the realization that his security depended on the existence of his now-dead mother. The heavily connotative diction of the final two sentences of the story indicates that rather than rising to maturity and knowledge Julian will always be weighted down in a life tormented by guilt and horror: "The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow." The brutality that characterizes Julian's relationship with his mother serves as the prototype for the subsequent exploration of conflict between generations throughout the cycle.

In "Greenleaf," O'Connor essentially repeats the themes of "Everything That Rises Must Converge" while shifting to the mother's point of view and emphasizing the role of the agent of destruction rather than the son's. Like Julian's mother, Mrs. May speaks in clichés, preoccupies herself with monetary concerns, and prides herself that as a widow she has sacrificed herself for the betterment of her sons. In her obsession with maintaining social status she, too, uses others—poor whites instead of Blacks—as a vehicle for rationalizing her innate sense of superiority. For example, when the Greenleaf boys were younger she patronizingly handed down to them her own sons' old clothes and toys. She also senses that her higher position in society is threatened, for the rising of Greenleaf's practical and educated sons promises to displace her own land and family just as Julian's mother's ancestral home was taken over by Negroes. Aspects of an older Julian appear in each of Mrs. May's bachelor sons, both in their thirties, who still live at home: as a misanthropic professor, Wesley indulges in sterile intellectualism; as an insurance salesman to Negroes, Scofield exploits them for his own benefit. Both respond to her overprotectiveness with the same petty contempt and impotent rage that Julian had hurled at his mother. Scofield, for example, strikes his mother where she is most vulnerable by threatening to marry a poor white who would thus inherit his other's farm.

O'Connor parallels parents and children in this story also. As a family on the rise, the Greenleafs—their name indicating ripeness—contrast with the Mays, a family in decline. Unlike Scofield and Wesley, Greenleaf's two sons, O.T. and E.T., are competent, married with three children each, and educated in agriculture. Whereas Wesley talks about Paris and Rome but never even goes to Atlanta, and Scofield was only a Private First Class at the end of his military service, the Greenleaf boys both became sergeants overseas where they met their French wives. Refusing to admit that the Greenleaf sons will eventually usurp the land and social position she hopes to maintain for her own sons, Mrs. May continually combats Greenleaf's innuendos to that effect. O'Connor also contrasts Mrs. May's religious attitudes with Mrs. Greenleaf's. Although the latter's primitive "prayer healing" appears grotesque and superstitious, it originates from the genuine conviction that her concern for suffering mankind carries some efficacy. On the other hand, Mrs. May is repulsed by this emotional outpouring directed at strangers, for she believes religion should be left at the church door and used only for such social ends as meeting prospective wives for her sons.

O'Connor develops the agent of the violent climax in "Greenleaf" more elaborately than in the first story, for, unlike the Negro woman, the bull acquires several levels of symbolism. On one level, it reflects an extension of the twinning technique: the bull—a scrub bull and therefore of inferior stock—poses a threat to the breeding habits of Mrs. May's herd just as the virility of the Greenleafs—whom Mrs. May thinks of as "scrub human"—threatens her conservative sense of a static class society. The bull gnaws at her hedges just as she feels that the Greenleafs have been gradually displacing her over the last fifteen years; the bull patiently waits for her until finally charging in anger just as Greenleaf has followed her demands patiently until finally losing his temper on the day she is killed. The bull is associated with the reproductive energy of the sun in her dream the night before her death just as the Greenleaf's modern milk parlor is filled with sunlight. The bull also symbolizes supernatural and reproductive forces moving Mrs. May toward regeneration: the hedge wreath that adorns the tip of his horns looks "like a menacing prickly crown"; the bull, described in the traditional religious imagery of Christ as bridegroom, listens at her bedroom window "like some patient god come down to woo her" and yet "like an uncouth country suitor"; at the end it buries its head in her lap "like a wild tormented lover." In O'Connor's Catholic world view, therefore, the bull ultimately symbolizes the life-affirming intrusion of grace which Mrs. May is free to accept or reject.

The "mental bubble" in which Mrs. May lives, however, will not permit her to recognize the clouded vision through which she perceives reality. Just as Julian's attempt to teach his mothe a lesson backfires, so does Mrs. May's attempt to get even with Greenleaf by showing that his son's lack of respect for him necessitates his killing their bull. Ironically, it is she who discovers the truth of the empty threat that she had earlier hurled at her sons, "you'll find out what Reality is when it's too late." Like Julian's mother who becomes disoriented at the moment of death, Mrs. May stands immobile in "freezing unbelief" like someone "whose sight had been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable." Any glimpse of self-revelation that penetrates her egoism is rejected, and the violent impact of the bull simply amounts to a collision that ends in death rather than a convergence with the divine that could effect a rising to a new level of consciousness. That her death occurs so violently stresses the degree to which O'Connor thinks that the ego must be jolted to perhaps glimpse the potential moment of epiphany.

In the opening of the next story, "A View of the Woods," O'Connor signals the continuation of her exploration of the narrow-minded self-righteousness of Mrs. May in the protagonist, Fortune, for he is first described as sitting on the bumper of his car in a tree-surrounded clearing just as Mrs. May sat on the hood of her car in the tree-surrounded field where the bull charged at the end of "Greenleaf." Older than Mrs. May, Fortune has had to face what Mrs. May only dreaded, the threat of a poor white like Greenleaf inheriting his property, for the man his daughter married against his wishes farms his land. To assert his sense of class superiority over Pitts, his son-in-law, who like Greenleaf has seven children, Fortune repeatedly sells prize pasture land to businessmen set upon developing the area for commercial interests rather than to Pitts. To insure, moreover, that Pitts does not inherit his land, he secretly arranges in his will to leave everything in trust to his favorite grandchild, Mary Fortune Pitts, with his lawyer as executor—an act parallel to Mrs. May's decision to entail her property so that her sons could not leave it to their wives if they married. Ironically, however, the proud attempts of both to perpetuate their wills after death are defeated, for the Greenleafs clearly are in the ascendance and Mary's death will provide Pitts with the property by default.

Although Fortune's daughter—like Julian, Scofield, and Wesley—feels bound by duty to tolerate her father, O'Connor shifts the emphasis of the conflict between generations from parent and child to grandparent and child in this story. In spite of the seventy-year gap in age, Fortune and Mary are spiritually close in their strength of will. Furthermore, O'Connor's twinning technique makes Fortune and Mary parallel figures: physically, Mary's face is "a small replica of the old man's," and temperamentally she possesses his same stubborn pride in resisting his determination to sell the lawn between the house and the highway. Only this recalcitrance and the seemingly willing acquiescence in allowing her father to whip her interfere with Fortune's conception of her as his double. To eliminate these imperfections he decides to teach her a lesson that, as with Julian in "Everything That Rises Must Converge," ironically reveals that he shares the faults he accuses Pitts of having: "a nasty temper and … unreasonable resentments." In the violent struggle with Mary in which he assumes the punitive role of Pitts that he so detests, Fortune's exclamation that "this ought to teach you a good lesson" rings hollow as he looks "down into the face that was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts." The spirit that he had intended to inculcate into Mary rages so violently when she kicks and claws him that he must strangle her in defense, only to suffer a stroke himself from the physical ordeal and the shock that his ever-spiraling capacity to rationalize his singularity has been deflated by his common identity with the character stains of Pitts.

In "A View of the Woods" O'Connor also elaborates on a theme only tangentially included elsewhere in the cycle: her questioning whether the progress of modern civilization proves that man spirals ever upward toward greater spiritual consciousness. Whereas the urban highrises that the bus journeys through in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" reveal the nightmare of the modern city, and the uniformity of the Greenleaf twins who seem "like one man in two skins" and live in a modern, warehouse-like home represents the hollowness of the middle class of the future, Fortune's conviction that he would not "let a cow pasture interfere with progress" signals the industrial exploitation and commercial dominance of modern life. Fortune's wedding of his patriotic cliches with "his duty to sell the lot … to insure the future" demonstrates the devitalization of the linguistic basis upon which American ideals are articulated. Envisioning the displacement of the woods by supermarkets, highways, and motels within five years, Fortune rationalizes the sensibility of selling the lawn plot because of the wealth and fame he will achieve as the founder and developer of a new vacation area. The Satanic overtones surrounding the entrepreneur who purchases the plot to build a gas station reinforce O'Connor's attitude; the spiritual emptiness of his combination country store, filling station, and dance hall is deftly suggested "by a field of old used- car bodies" and a line of tombstones for sale that border it on either side. The "huge yellow monster" bulldozer systematically "gorging itself on clay" at the beginning and ending of the story symbolizes Fortune's rationalistic pursuit of his unnatural designs on both Mary and the woods.

By locating her limited omniscient point of view in the younger member of the generational conflict in "The Enduring Chill," O'Connor explores similar situations from a different angle: like Mrs. May in "Greenleaf," Asbury's widowed mother has put her two children through college by running a dairy farm; like Fortune toward his daughter and son-in-law in "A View of the Woods," Asbury plans to triumph over his mother through his death. Returning home after attending college in the North and failing to succeed in as an artist in New York City, Asbury follows the same self-righteous pattern of O'Connor's other pseudo-intellectuals in his determination to introduce his mother to "reality" in order to "assist her in the process of growing up." Convinced that he suffers from a fatal disease promising imminent death, he hopes to accomplish this lesson through a lengthy letter to be read after his burial, accusing her of ruining his imagination and talent without destroying "the desire for these things." His equation of this letter with Kafka's letter to his father, as well as the attempt to simulate a Yeatsian style in its writing, deflate his pretentious, self-serving critical faculty. The picture in his room of "a maiden chained to a rock" epitomizes the sterile cliches in which his romantic self-pity envisions his fate.

The root of Asbury's inability to adjust to reality, however, lies not so much in his pose as an artist as in his dependency on his mother. Like Julian of "Everything That Rises Must Converge," except that he has attempted rather than merely projected an artistic career, Asbury struggles to combat the domineering mother set upon insuring that her child remains an appendage of herself. From the opening of the story, when in response to his mother's suggestion that he remove his coat he defensively shouts, "I'm old enough to know when I want to take my coat off," to the conclusion, all his actions stem from his need to defy her: he attempts to weaken her power by encouraging the Black dairy workers, Morgan and Randall, to break her smoking ban in the milk house; he irritates her Protestant mistrust of Catholicism by asking her to send for a Jesuit when he thinks he is dying. Even his approaching death, which he regards as "his greatest triumph" and a gift from "his god, Art to compensate for his artistic failure, was precipitated by his vain attempt to convince Morgan and Randall to break his mother's major rule by following his example and drinking unpasteurized milk. The significant experience he imagines death holds for him never arries, for his supposedly fatal illness is eventually diagnosed as undulant fever whose symptoms will recur periodically, ironically promising that he, rather than his mother, will be left with an "enduring chill." Compared to the tragic portrayal of Fortune's projected triumph through his death in "A View of the Woods," O'Connor's treatment in "The Enduring Chill" proves devastatingly comic.

O'Connor also imparts to the title another level of meaning through her development of the manifestation of the supernatural. Although Father Finn's formulaic apologetics are satirized along with Asbury's fashionable agnosticism, Goetz's Eastern philosophy, and Father Vogle's corrupt asceticism, he does diagnose Asbury's spiritual dilemma: "The Holy Ghost will not come until you see yourself as you are—a lazy ignorant conceited youth." The reference to the Holy Ghost, who is frequently represented in religious imagery as a bird, can be paralleled to Asbury's earlier figurative association of his imagination with a hawk and his illusion that the water stains on the ceiling above his bed resemble "a fierce bird with spread wings" and an icicle in its beak. The continued presence of the bird above him which he felt "was there for some purpose" functions, like the bull in "Greenleaf," as the ever-available agent through which grace can be revealed. Just as the emblem of his imagination is encaged within his derivative writing style, however, the Holy Spirit descends ultimately "emblazoned in ice instead of fire," because Asbury's agnostic pose leads him to collide rather than converge with this manifestation of the divine; his spiritual as well as artistic "mental bubbles" burst, leaving him frozen like Julian in his incapacity to realize the implications of his revelation.

In the fifth and sixth stories, "The Comforts of Home" and "The Lame Shall Enter First," O'Connor focuses on the conflict generated by a parent's decision to bring home a delinquent to attempt rehabilitation. In both instances, however, the intruder proves incorrigible while upsetting the domestic tranquility and threatening the security of an only child. In "The Comforts of Home" Thomas and his mother resemble the parent-child types recurrent throughout the cycle: a bachelor at thirty-five, the pseudo-intellectual Thomas writes for the local Historical Society and still resides at the home of his widowed mother for whom he feels simultaneously both love and hate. Her decision to return home from her paternalistic jail visit bringing a nymphomaniac, Star Drake, to whom she has taken a box of candy—"her favorite nice thing to do"—unsettles Thomas, who condescendingly labels Star Drake a "moral moron" and petulantly warns that he will leave if she remains. When his mother's excessive sentimentalism leads her to conclude that she would not send Thomas back to jail if he had suffered like Star Drake and that the girl can thus share their home, Thomas, realizing that he cannot forfeit the comforts of home, wallows in comparing his own impotent efforts to remove the girl with the ruthless authority his father would have successfully exerted. In the resulting conflict O'Connor explores the Freudian implications of the parent-child types recurrent throughout the cycle: Thomas's Oedipal fantasy, his repressed desire for Star Drake, and his overcompensation for the failure to assume a masculine role.

On another level, though, O'Connor continues from "The Enduring Chill" her treatment of the sterility of the overly rationalistic view of life. She makes fun of the professional attempts of the psychiatrists and lawyer to categorize Star Drake's condition by satirically noting their verdict: she "was a psychopathic personality, not insane enough for the asylum, not criminal enough for the jail, not stable enough for society." She develops her theme through Thomas, who parallels Asbury in regarding the devil as "only a manner of speaking," but contrasts with Asbury's agnosticism in his Pelagian belief that Star Drake represents "blameless corruption because there was no responsible faculty behind it." Soon, however, he realizes the fatuity of accounting for her as an "unendurable form of innocence," for she unsettles his sense of order by disturbing him in a way that lies beyond "his power of analysis." On the other hand, his mother seems to advance beyond the simplicity of her sentimentalism and to realize the tainted nature of man, for the experience of Star Drake plunges her, like Mrs. Greenleaf, "into mourning for the world." When Thomas cannot mature beyond his rationalistic need to discern a world perfectly ordered for good and learn to accept O'Connor's belief in man's need of God's grace, he damns not only Star Drake "but the entire order of the universe that made her possible." In his desperation at the end he fires at Star Drake, hoping that the blast will "bring an end to evil in the world" and restore the "peace of perfect order." His shot, however, only multiplies the disorder, and the arrival of the sheriff whose brain works "instantly like a calculating machine" only reinforces the absurdity of attempting to account for experience through reason alone.

In "The Lame Shall Enter First," O'Connor transfers the limited omniscient point of view and the brunt of the irony to the parent and develops more fully a similar triangle of characters involved in the same plot situation. A widower of one year, Sheppard is more excited about what "he could do" (italics mine) for a fourteen-year-old delinquent, Rufus Johnson, than for his neglected ten-year-old son, Norton, who has not yet adjusted to his mother's death—a fact that Sheppard, unable to account for rationally, concludes reflects his son's selfishness. Very much aware that he is "busy helping other people" during his volunteer counseling at the reformatory, Sheppard is drawn toward the delinquent not out of sentimentality like Thomas's mother but because Rufus, the most intelligent and deprived boy he has worked with, represents a vehicle through which he can self-righteously demonstrate the efficacy and kindness of his good works. When all efforts to improve Rufus are met with resistance, Sheppard continually rationalizes to avoid confronting his own limitations and ineffectiveness. When the boy shows hostility toward him, he concludes that Rufus is only upholding his own pride by pretending not to like him; when the boy seems bored, Sheppard self-contentedly reflects in his inflated manner that Rufus is secretly learning the essential thing: "that his benefactor was impervious to insult and that there were no cracks in his armor of kindness and patience"; when the boy mocks Sheppard's efforts by breaking into a home, he decides as Fortune did with Mary that he only needs to be firmer to teach Rufus "that he could not treat with impunity someone who had shown him nothing but kindness."

O'Connor's satiric depiction of the Pelagian conception of man is continued and more fully developed in this story in Sheppard. Steeped in the modern theories of counseling and social work, Sheppard rationalizes that Rufus's delinquency results from his unfortunate backwoods upbringing by his fundamentalist grandfather and his abrupt transplantation to the city. To counteract these deterministic forces that have misshapen his values, Sheppard resorts to such secular means as encyclopedias, a telescope, new clothes, and a good home life to rehabilitate Rufus. In all his attempts to save him, however, he can never acknowledge what for O'Connor is the essential prerequisite for reform, God's grace; instead, when Rufus warns that only Jesus can save him, Sheppard appeals to the boy's intelligence, claiming that the Bible is only "'for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and figure things out for themselves.'" Even when at one point he feels "a momentary full despair as if he were faced with some elemental warping of nature that had happened too long ago to be corrected now," he refuses to ascribe Rufus's defects to any cause that cannot be altered by man. His rationalizations that Rufus's incorrigible behavior was compensation for his club foot, O'Connor's symbol for original sin, and that an orthopedic shoe can rectify the deformity epitomize for O'Connor the absurdity of his secular optimism. Even at the end when Rufus threatens Sheppard's position in the community by telling a newspaper reporter about his atheistic beliefs, Sheppard clings to the same view, telling Rufus: "You're not evil, you're mortally confused. You don't have to make up for that foot, you don't have to…." Rufus, however, has proven to be a more formidable opponent to Sheppard than Star Drake was to Thomas, and Sheppard appears to be on the brink of revelation after Rufus is taken away, for the litany-like repetition of "I did more for him than I did for my own child" does seem to burst the "mental bubble" of his self-righteous claim that "I have nothing to reproach myself with." The epiphany is aborted, though, and, like Mrs. May who at the moment of death resembled "a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable," Sheppard "closed his eyes against the revelation." He cannot compromise his hopelessly optimistic humanitarianism to admit that man must acknowledge spiritual lameness to understand his nature. Norton's suicide, then, only reinforces the folly of Sheppard's position, for, ironically, Norton does launch a flight into space—symbolic for Sheppard of the infinite capacity of man's intelligence—but Norton's flight is to his mother and not the moon, and with Jesus and not in a space ship.

In "Revelation," the final story of the cycle as well as the last one written, O'Connor manages to cluster together motifs present in the other stories and to round out themes recurrent throughout the cycle. The assembly of middle-class whites, lower-class whites, and Negroes in the story amounts to a microcosm of the world depicted in the cycle, and their congregating together in a doctor's waiting room reiterates the motif of the lingering, often violent, effects of physical and psychological illness, representative for O'Connor of man's tainted condition: Julian's mother's high blood pressure, Wesley's rheumatic fever, Fortune's heart condition, Asbury's undulant fever, Star Drake's nymphomania, Rufus's club foot, and Claud's ulcerous leg. Ruby Turpin, paralleling the narrow-minded, self-righteous characters of the other stories, is the quintessential egoist, continually thanking Jesus for her superior character:

"If it's one thing I am," Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, "it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! It could have been different!!" For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. "Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!" she cried aloud.

Her more-than-coincidental resemblance to Julian's mother of "Everything That Rises Must Converge" seems to explain O'Connor's decision to frame the cycle with these two stories. In spite of being middle-aged and overweight, both regard themselves as attractive; just as Julian's mother considers herself the only "lady" who attends the reducing class because no one else wears a hat and gloves, Ruby confirms her socially superior status by noticing the shabbiness and gaudiness of the other patients' shoes; just as Julian's mother enters the bus "as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her," Ruby enters the doctor's waiting room and is shocked to find no one willing to change seats to accommodate Claud and her; both begin a general conversation for the benefit of all and manage to sustain almost a monologue; just as Julian's mother patronizingly offers the Negro boy a penny, Ruby patronizingly explains to a Negro delivery boy how to push a button to ring for the nurse; and through bland complacency both enrage an adversary who triggers a violent confrontation. The opposite responses to the crisis, however, indicate the distinction between the two and signal the thematic turn in the cycle. The placing of such significance on the final story is characteristic of a short story cycle unified primarily through similarly treated themes, for in another short story cycle structured on this basis, Camus' Exile and the Kingdom, the final story, "The Growing Stone," also signals a thematic turn in the cycle. Whereas Julian's mother is only resorting to one of her stock phrases when, describing the disorder of the world, she says "the bottom rail is on the top," Ruby is on the brink of accepting the deflation of her egotistic ordering of the world and the grace concomitant with such an insight moments before her vision when she defiantly shouts, "Put that bottom rail on top."

Ruby also resembles other characters in the cycle. Her habit of naming and ordering the classes of people represents the same obsession with class distinctions Mrs. May and Fortune indulge in and, like them, she feels more hostility for "white trash" than Negroes, commenting "there's a heap of things worse than a nigger." When the "white trash" woman says that all Negroes should be sent back to Africa, Ruby and the stylish lady smugly exchange glances with each other, affirming an enlightened liberalism toward Negroes much like the progressive racial poses Julian and Asbury affect. Ultimately, however, Ruby's paternalism backfires on her as it does on Asbury, for when Asbury in desperation seeks communion with Morgan and Randall and Ruby turns to her Black workers for a candid evaluation of Mary Grace's accusation, both receive only flattery in return. Moreover, Ruby's sense of being pursued by some mysterious force in Mary Grace who "knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition" repeats and advances the pattern throughout the cycle of the intrusion of a figure symbolic of man's tainted nature of God's healing grace: Mrs. May and the bull, Asbury and the bird on the ceiling, Thomas and Star Drake, Sheppard and Rufus.

O'Connor also signals the emphasis "Revelation" carries as the climactic story of the cycle by breaking the pattern of the location of her limited omniscient point of view. In the six previous stories the point of view focuses three times on the older member of the generation conflict and three times on the younger member. But in "Revelation" O'Connor renders the story through the indirect discourse of Ruby, who observes the conflict between the stylish lady and her daughter, Mary Grace, both of whom through the twinning technique represent the gap between Ruby and her own self-image. Through the non-verbal glances of approval and the Gospel hymn clichés that she exchanges with Mary Grace's mother, Ruby is able to identify with an idealized vision of herself as attractive, slim and fashionable; on the other hand, the persistent staring of the fat, ugly, ill-natured Mary Grace threatens Ruby with the negative self-image she avoids confronting, repeatedly attempting to assure herself that "the girl might be confusing her with somebody else." Mary Grace's violent assault and humiliation of Ruby is motivated by seeing in her a less threatening double of the coercive parent figure who has retarded her independent growth by subtly holding over her pious platitudes demanding gratefulness for all she has received. Like the other young intellectuals of the cycle, especially Asbury who likewise has been educated in the North, Mary Grace arrogantly assumes the task of teaching Ruby and, indirectly, her mother, a lesson. The violent hurling of the book and subsequent physical attack only reinforce the impotence of her rage, though, for after being restrained she rests her head in her mother's lap and her fingers grip her mother's thumb "like a baby's," paralleling Julian's final childlike exclamation of "Mama, Mama" and grotesquely epitomizing the treatment of the profound cruelty involved in the generational struggle of parents and children throughout the cycle.

The significance of the placement of "Revelation" as the final story of the cycle is explained by the fact that it does not end at its violent climax like the six previous stories but continues on to show the effects of Ruby's epiphany. The degree to which Ruby's identity has been unsettled is reflected in her surprise upon returning home to find the farm unaltered. When she lies down, only to see the image of a wart hog, her state of shock eases and she begins to realize the implications of her revelation: "she had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now…. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working church-going woman." Throughout the afternoon she wrestles with this realization, scowling at the ceiling "as if there were unintelligible handwriting" on it: unlike Asbury, however, she is able to decipher and accept what she sees there. The request that Claud, who previously had amounted to nothing more than her satellite, kiss her demonstrates the dread in which she dwells and the awakened need for love she feels. Not until her vision at the pig parlor, though, does she fully understand and accept the grace offered her. Mary Grace's name suggests her symbolic function as the vehicle through which God's grace intrudes. There in a tree-surrounded, sundrenched open area reminiscent of the field in which the bull charges Mrs. May and the clearing in which Fortune beats Mary, the spiritual manifestation of Ruby's epiphany is delivered and not aborted.

O'Connor's paralleling of the pig parlor with the doctor's waiting room reinforces the grotesqueness of Ruby's spiritual slothfulness and her need for grace: the pig parlor is described as "a square of concrete as large as a small room"; the same "a-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin" sounds are heard in both; Ruby commands the arena of eight hogs before her just as she had attempted to command the attention of the eight patients. In the last fling of defiance at her revelation, Ruby squirts the eyes of the fat, slouching sow with the water hose, demanding to know just how it parallels her and not a slovenly "white trash" person. It is at this moment that the surroundings take on "a mysterious hue" and Ruby gazes down at the hogs "as if through the very heart of mystery":

A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak 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. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

Ironically, Ruby finds herself at the opposite end of the bridge from which her earlier self-satisfied belief in God's approval placed her, for the "bottom rail" is shown to be "on top." The vision serves as the synthesizing vehicle for the cycle, bringing into focus the leveling of the succession of self-righteous hypocrites whose inflated "mental bubbles" obscure their vision, generating a self-conception based less on reality than that of such "white trash" figures as Greenleaf and Pitts, such Negroes as Randall and Morgan, such "lunatics" as Star Drake and Rufus. Unlike the protagonists of the other stories, however, Ruby ultimately accepts her spiritual lameness and converges rather than collides with the grace offered in her moment of epiphany. As she walks away from the pig parlor at the end, the noise of the invisible crickets sounds to her like a hallelujah chorus; she has risen to a new level of consciousness where she can see the world as infused with spirit.

The demonstrated interconnectedness of these seven stories culminating with "Revelation" establishes that O'Connor intended Everything That Rises Must Converge to be much more than a mere collection of randomly selected and arranged stories. A consideration of "The Partridge Festival," the story she decided to exclude from the cycle, as well as "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day," the two stories added by her editor after her death, only reinforces this viewpoint. Since it was written and published during the eight-year period from 1956 to 1964 in which the other seven stories were written and published and originally intended to be part of the cycle, "The Partridge Festival," as might be expected, closely resembles the included stories in character types, point of view, themes, and motifs. In Calhoun, O'Connor maintains her consistently comic and ironic treatment of the would-be intellectual returned home hostile to the materialistic values fostered by his great-grandfather and Partridge. Satirizing Calhoun's elaborate psychological theorizing about Singleton whom he had never met, O'Connor shows that the murderer Calhoun, cast as a scapegoat for the commercialism of the townspeople, is no more than a mentally deranged, lecherous old man. As with Asbury in "The Enduring Chill," O'Connor particularly mocks the inflated, sterile phrases Calhoun as an amateur writer resorts to in his romantic defense of Singleton: "He was an individualist…. A man who would not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors. A non-conformist. He was a man of depth living among caricatures and they finally drove him mad, unleashed all his violence on themselves. An elaborate paralleling of characters provides the basic technical method for thematic development in this story also: Calhoun consciously identifies with the characterization he superimposes on Singleton, vicariously hoping "to mitigate his own guilt" for the devotion to commercialism his successful salesman's job represents; Because of Mary Elizabeth's similar identification with Singleton and her fledgling attempt at writing, she and Calhoun recognize "that in their common kinship with him [Singleton], a kinship with each other was unavoidable"; and, ultimately, Calhoun sees in his own reflection in Mary Elizabeth's glasses that in spite of his self-righteous attempt to remain aloof from Partridge's commercialism, he ironically resembles the "round, innocent, undistinguished" visage of the master-merchant great-grandfather he had condescendingly repudiated. (Mary Elizabeth's name relates her to the three other Marys of the cycle, all of whom exhibit a similar steadfastness in self-righteously asserting the concept of their own infallibility: Mary Fortune Pitts of "A View of the Woods," Mary George of "The Enduring Chill," and Mary Grace of "Revelation.") The concluding moment of epiphany, as in the first six stories of the cycle, is again aborted, for the incorrigible self-image Calhoun sees "fixed him where he was" and foreshadows the future azalea festivals he will never escape from. Clearly, the story as it was intended parallels the other stories in the cycle; moreover, considering the patterned movement of the location of the limited omniscient point of view from parent to child in one story after another, "The Partridge Festival" seems to have been intended to contrast with "A View of the Woods," for while the former focuses on the perspective of a great-grandchild, the latter focuses on a grandfather. Any explanation for O'Connor's decision to omit the story from the cycle can only involve speculation; perhaps she made what would seem an appropriately astute aesthetic judgement that "The Partridge Festival" simply lacked the suggestive thematic richness of the other stories in its all-too-formulaic working out of related thematic considerations. In any case, the story does bear out the theory that during this eight-year period O'Connor was composing individual stories with a cyclic framework in mind, even when one of them did not perhaps satisfy her aesthetic criteria for inclusion.

Just as the similarity of "The Partridge Festival" to theme and technique in the cycle reinforces the interlocking relationship of the seven included stories, so, too, can the differences of "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day" further substantiate the structural unity of the collection. Written in the last few months of her life and later added to the cycle by O'Connor's editor, both of these stories resemble the others in the way any works of the same author reflect the stylistic and thematic concerns of a single creator. The particular method and thematic emphasis of the two, however, do not correspond to the stories intended for inclusion in the cycle and, therefore, hinder an understanding of the structural basis of the cycle if considered part of it. "Parker's Back" best illustrates this point, for such basic recurring elements in the other stories as sickness, the arrogance of a pseudo-intellectual, the struggle between social classes, the conflict between generations, and the twinning of characters are absent. And although "Judgement Day" contains these elements, they are tangential to its development. More importantly, "Judgement Day" relates less significantly to the cycle than to O'Connor's favorite story, "The Geranium," for "Judgement Day" represents O'Connor's final revision and expansion of the earlier story written ten years before the first story of the cycle was even published.

Considering only the published version of Everything That Rises Must Converge, though, "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day" differ from the other stories in such cardinal aspects as tone and point of view. Although O'Connor does render the indirect discourse of the main character of each story from a limited omniscient viewpoint, she mixes omniscient commentary with it to a much greater extent than in the others, for the irony in these two does not hinge primarily on the protagonist's unwitting revelation of his own self-righteousness. As a result, O'Connor's tone toward Parker and Tanner is more sympathetic than to the seven protagonists of the cycle: Parker's allegorized search for meaning is motivated by a singular earnestness that leads him ultimately to assume the Christ-like burden—literally, the image of the Byzantine Christ is tattooed on his back—and to accept his Biblical name and the prophetic vision concomitant with it; Tanner's steadfast compassion for Coleman, his desire to return south for burial and his faith in a judgment day lead him at the end to the vision of physical resurrection that overshadows his death. As a result, the brunt of O'Connor's irony falls in "Parker's Back" on such minor figures as the commercial artist who desecrates religious images and the fundamentalistic Sarah Ruth who negates the joy of life and in "Judgement Day" on Tanner's vain daughter who helps her father only begrudgingly and the dehumanized Black actor who murders Tanner. Clearly, then, "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day" differ from the seven stories of the cycle in theme and technique; in addition, their placement as the eighth and ninth stories upsets the placing of "Revelation" as the final story and climax of the book. That the two stories O'Connor worked on after completing the cycle diverge from the pattern of the included ones further supports viewing Everything That Rises Must Converge as a collection of purposely selected and arranged stories.

Throughout Everything That Rises Must Converge O'Connor varies the location of her limited omniscient point of view and interweaves parallel thematic patterns to link together the seven stories. Again and again she dramatizes the violent manifestation of grace to a spiritually empty, narrow-minded egoist, unbalancing him to the point that he cannot regain his equilibrium. The cumulative effect of her ironic leveling of self-righteous figures in varying contexts emphasizes her religious belief in man's spiritual lameness and need for God's grace. Ruby Turpin in "Revelation" exemplifies man's capacity to respond to this instant of direct illumination and assume his role in what O'Connor calls "our slow participation" in Christ's redemption. This eschatological view of mankind that she shares with Teilhard finds an apt structural vehicle for expression in the short story cycle, for the repeated exploration of protagonists who collide rather than converge with the grace offered in their moment of epiphany conveys her sense of the continual spiritual upheaval necessary if man's consciousness is to rise to converge with God at Point Omega.