"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, the kind which seeks to explain a fictional whole not only in terms of its parts but also in relation to the reader's apprehension of the story's shaping principle. Miss O'Connor's brief statement, in fact, closely parallels R. S. Crane's Neo-Aristotelian argument about causal inquiry as a method of criticism. Crane contends that in order to speak critically about any one part of literary work it is first necessary to determine its "essential cause." This cause, he argues, is the writer's primary intuition of form, an intuition which will enable him to synthesize his materials into a unified whole and which, in turn, will correspond to the reader's experience of the work. In other words, we cannot determine the function of the individual parts of a story without a prior induction from the story itself of a shaping principle which, in what Crane calls "imitative" works, has the power to affect our emotions in a certain way. The starting point, therefore, in this kind of inquiry, would be a description of the moral and emotional qualities which characterize our experience as readers, the assumption being that if we have read carefully and sensitively, our experience will coincide closely with the shaping principle of the whole. This is what Miss O'Connor means, I think, when she says that we must be able to "apprehend the form" before we can "apprehend anything else about the work"; which is to say that the relationship between the way a thing is made and its shaping form is an integral one. It is this shaping form, according to Crane, which we as readers, by reasoning backward from effect to cause, can use to make explicit the function of any part of a well-made story.

Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" can be read from the perspective of these general principles. This is not to suggest, of course, that other views are not possible. Perhaps the most frequent readings of the story have derived from the thematic perspective and have aimed to show the relationship of O'Connor's fiction to something else. Although thematic principles and analogical methods make for legitimate critical inquiry, they are not calculated to shed much light on the particular shape of an individual story as this is reconstructed by formal analysis. All I am suggesting therefore, is that we can account for the form which gives the story meaning by beginning with the plot as experienced, that is, by beginning with the affective reaction which our experience of the story forces upon us. If we then take this response as related to the synthesizing or shaping of the whole, we can use it to explain some of the narrative choices Flannery O'Connor made in developing the story.

Our experience of "Everything That Rises" is primarily a reversal of our expectations and desires for the principal characters and a change in attitude toward them. Standing at the center of the action is Julian, a disheartened, cynical, confused, misanthropic young man. He habitually uses his sense of moral superiority to elevate himself and thereby judge the inadequacies of others. Playing the intellectual sophisticate, he sees his task as instructing the unenlightened, especially his mother, in the ways of "true culture"; and for Julian true culture is always defined in terms of "the mind." He is, in short, a self-pitying malcontent who enjoys the role of martyr and who treats his mother with an unrelenting contempt, offering her no love or sympathy and delighting in her discomfort. Only twice does he waver from what he is shown everywhere else to be: first, in one of his initial reveries, when he longs for the old Chestny mansion; and later, on the bus, when he senses his mother's innocence. But in each case the real Julian quickly emerges.

Julian's mother, on the other hand, is a poor, struggling widow, who has sacrificed her own well-being for her son's education and who sees him now, with diploma in hand, reduced to peddling typewriters. Naive in outlook and understanding, she sees her identity in terms of a glamorous but lost past, truth in terms of the platitudinous cliché, "true culture" in terms of "the heart," and success in terms of social melioration. Her concern is genuine but her vision is limited.

These are the two characters whose conflict Miss O'Connor plays out before us in three scenes. In the first scene, Julian's depression, occasioned by his mother's rather outlandish garb, erupts eventually into a string of contemptuous rejoinders at her efforts at conversation. At every point mother and son are diametrically opposed, whether the issue be the purple and green hat, or the remembrance of things past, or the "rise" of the Negro. The conflict is developed further in the bus scene, where their attitudes about the racial question, prepared for in scene one, become the central issue. Here, Julian's gambit with the Negro man having failed, talk subsides as mother and son engage in a game of glances. The narrator's intrusions into Julian's mind at this point show us most clearly the shallowness and pretension of his intellectualism. His efforts to atone for his mother's racial prejudice are sham, since his motivation to dramatize her pettiness precludes any humane concern, even though he postures such concern. The climax of the second episode, and of the story itself, comes in the encounter with the Negro woman, everything that rises converging figuratively in the recognition by Julian's mother that she and the Negro woman are wearing the same hat; and converging literally, moments later, with the impact of the black woman's fist.

What occurs in the final moving scene is Julian's discovery: the recognition which issues in his change of character. His perverse intellectualism suddenly pales before the stark reality of his mother's death; so that his futile, yet tender, cry to her, just before she crumples to the pavement, makes mockery of his earlier testimony that "instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free from her and could see her with complete objectivity." But now, the terrifying moment becomes for Julian an epiphany, dissolving the vanity in his assertion of emotional freedom and melting his contempt. His cries for help suggest not merely the panic of the moment, effacing his earlier claim of fearlessness; they suggest also his desperate awareness of the dark state of his own soul. The final words of the narrator, which show Julian on the threshold of "the world of guilt and sorrow," make explicit his discovery. Recognition and reversal are coincident, and the change which comes from Julian's new knowledge is imminent.

What Flannery O'Connor has done in the final moving scene is crucial in the description of our overall experience of the story; for it is here that what I have referred to as the reversal of our expectations, desires, and attitudes is forced upon us. By carefully controlling our feelings about the two characters, Miss O'Connor has turned upside down what we have been made to feel up to this point. Our experience is one of agreeable astonishment, in that a young man, who has knowingly done evil and yet who is unaware of the pretension in his moral posturing, encounters a shocking event that changes his moral nature: it alters the attitude toward the evil he has done wittingly and deflates his unconscious moral egoism. Our experience, in the first place, is agreeable, in that an unsympathetic character, one whose actions and thoughts have aroused our moral indignation, has changed in such a way that our reaction of vexed displeasure toward him has become understanding; our disapprobation, sympathy. In short, the change in Julian's character is for the better, and we are gratified by the moral reversal. Our experience, in the second place, is one of astonishment, in that within Julian's character there has been too much which is unredeemed for us to desire this moral change and too little which is redeeming for us to expect it. Rather, what we expect and desire until the reversal occurs is something quite singular: the belief that poetic justice will be served if Julian is somehow punished.

In the case of Julian's mother, we experience quite the opposite effect: something neither unexpected nor agreeable. Her moral nature throughout the story has caused reactions more sympathetic than our response to Julian; and this is due to the fact that her shortcomings are less vicious and blameworthy, since they derive from unconscious prejudice and naivete. In other words, she is more innocent than Julian, and our feeling toward her at the end is one of pathos. She is a pitiable, unknowing victim, struck down before moral change becomes an option. And thus our response to her fate is the reverse of that satisfaction we find in Julian's imminent new understanding.

Precisely what happens to Julian's mother is significant, for it qualifies our reaction not only to her fate but also, and more importantly, to Julian's. I have spoken of the death of Julian's mother, even though there is no explicit statement to this effect. But we must assume, I think, that when her eye closes having raked Julian's face and found nothing, she does die, or at least that she is to die shortly. What happens to Julian—his imminent entry into the world of guilt and sorrow—is difficult to explain unless we draw this inference. To approach the question from the other end: Given the narrator's statement that Julian is shortly to become sorrowful and guilty, what are the causes in the action which explain this effect? To have Julian's mother suffer only a stroke is not enough to account for the change; for although the narrator expresses at one point Julian's qualms about pushing his mother to the extent that a stroke would result, he is possessed throughout by a malevolent desire to see her suffer, to teach her a lesson in morality by hurting her, even by directly inflicting the pain himself ("he could with pleasure have slapped her"); so that a heart attack alone is insufficient cause for Julian's final reaction. In other words, if death does not ensue, then Julian gets more or less what he desired all along; and if this were the case, we would be forced to imagine the last lines of the story informing us of something quite different, like Julian's re-entry into his world of moral pride and smug self-esteem. To see Julian's mother suffer anything less than death is sufficient justification for his sadness, at most, but hardly for guilt and sorrow. In short, to assume that his mother does not die is to call into question Flannery O'Connor's artistry.

If our reaction to the moral and emotional qualities of the story as a whole corresponds to the shaping principle or form, then, as I have argued, the various parts of the whole should contribute to this essential cause. Take, for example, the scene on the bus. How does this part of the story help to develop the shaping cause? Comprised of three separate episodes (each marked by someone boarding the bus), the scene serves two primary functions: first, it further develops Julian's character and thereby makes possible the complication of the conflict between him and his mother; and second, it provides a means for achieving the narrative climax.

In the first scene of the story Julian's character is presented only in outline. He is depressed about the prospects of tagging along with his mother, gloomy about what the future holds for him, possessed by mixed feeling (contempt and longing) regarding the ancestral heritage in which his mother takes such pride, and overcome by self-pity to the point of having a martyr complex. Clearly, this sketch of Julian's character must be developed if we are to explain the conclusion to the story and our reaction to it. It is not surprising, then, that this becomes one of Miss O'Connor's chief aims in the bus scene. And it is especially because of this scene that Julian emerges as a highly unsympathetic character. His malevolence and misanthropy and moral pretension are particularly heightened, especially in those places where the narrator gives us extended inside views.

It is significant, I think, that after Julian's abortive attempt at conversing with the Negro man, he utters not one word for the remainder of the scene; for this, coupled with his fantasies, indicates the kind of passive character he is and contrasts sharply with the later, genuine outburst to his stricken mother. It is also in this scene that we see that Julian's views of himself are precisely the wrong views. Some such process of artistic reasoning as just described seems to have guided Miss O'Connor in developing Julian's character in this scene. The form of the whole, created by that intuition of hers which works to shape the total effect, demands that she endow her characters with certain moral traits. I am suggesting that Julian must possess those qualities developed in the bus scene for our experience of the effect to be what it in fact is; so that creating these traits in Julian's character is one of her chief accomplishments in this scene.

If the form of the story requires that Julian embody these necessary moral qualities, it also demands particular kinds of probable incidents. Reasoning a posteriori, we can see that with the entrance of the Negro woman and her son, Flannery O'Connor has introduced the means for reaching the story's climax. It seems likely that by this point in the story she must have had some conception of a conclusion which would call for a sudden, shocking event, resulting in the heart attack and subsequent death of Julian's mother. Some violent action could be used to achieve this effect. It is highly unlikely, however, that Julian, passive dreamer that he is, would be capable of perpetrating any violence upon his mother. Other characters, therefore, will be needed as a means to this end.

If these are reasonable assumptions, Miss O'Connor's problem now becomes that of determining some point of dissension or conflict which will lead to the violent action. Her introduction of the Negro woman and her son, with the ingenious little game of musical bus-seats and son-swapping that ensues, is a perfect solution; for this will bring the racial issue clearly to the fore. And given the kind of woman Julian's mother has already been shown to be, the conclusion of the scene is practically inevitable. We have already seen her condescending racial attitudes—initially, in her discussion with Julian in the first scene, and later in her brief dialogue with the woman with protruding teeth—so that we expect her to display the same kind of unthinking attitude toward the Negro woman and her son. And we are also prepared to encounter some blundering expression of this patronizing manner, given the disposition of some of her previous remarks about "darkies," "colored friends," "mixed feelings," and the like.

Julian's mother, of course, obliges our expectations in both cases, the immediate result being the blow to the face, and the ultimate effect being death and Julian's subsequent change. The racial issue itself, which is so prominent throughout, should not be construed as the story's shaping principle. It is simply a means necessary for the climax and final effect: the Negro woman disappears when she has served her function, just as the Negro man, having performed his fictional duty, is made conveniently to disembark when Miss O'Connor's front seats get a bit too crowded. My conclusion is this: Given the form of the whole, which I have defined experientially in terms of the achieved effect, the two chief things accomplished by the bus scene are both probable and necessary: making Julian into a morally unsympathetic character and providing a means for the story's climax. As Flannery O'Connor herself has said, "I try to satisfy those necessities that make themselves felt in the work itself."

Finally, it should be observed that Julian's mother has also made a discovery in having to confront, shockingly, the truth of Julian's one correct claim: her condescending and patronizing attitude toward Negroes. But her discovery issues in the tragedy and irony of death: tragedy, from Julian's perspective, since it is only through the loss of his mother that he can enter his new life; and fateful irony from his mother's perspective, since her irresponsibility, though more innocent than his, is not allowed the same potential for change. Whereas she has been shown throughout to be ludicrous and pathetic and even pitiable, she embodies at the end, in her lurch toward death, what Yeats called "a vision of terror." We respond accordingly. Julian, on the other hand, for whom we have been able to muster little sympathy, has now become a young man whose desperate cries give us sympathetic joy in his change and more than a modest optimism for his future. The story, then, is finally Julian's story. His mother's death becomes the terrible means by which he can grow toward maturity. And the beginning of this growth is what the story is all about.