Everything that Rises Must Converge, Good Country People, and The Boarding House - Essay Example

Most of Connor’s characters are physically or mentally deformed, and they seek redemption at the end. With some sort of epiphany the characters of Joyce emerge from the dark world in which they were doomed to live. The short stories under scrutiny in this paper are Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Good Country People” and Joyce’s “The Boarding House”. The focus of this paper is on examining how these writers have used symbolism and irony in their writing and how with these the development of relationships among the characters help the authors to convey their messages.

Each following paragraph takes up one story for this analysis. In “Everything that Rises Must Converge” O’Connor introduces a mother who is incapable of realizing the new reality of desegregation. Still living in her romantic fantasy of her past aristocratic mansion, she refuses to see the convergence of a new society in which all are equal. In order to highlight this weakness in her character, the author contrasts her with her own son who has accepted civil rights movement and tolerance.

This conflict is reflected through a simple event, a bus journey. Right from the beginning of the story the narrator gives close attention to the cap she mother wears: “She was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity” (Convergence). . t her habit of sticking to her stubborn past multiplies the inherent weakness in her character: ““If you'll never learn where you are,” he said, “you can at least learn where I am” “(Convergence).

There is no possibility of any form of convergence between the mother and the son. As the story comes to the end, the transforming cultural landscape and the mindscape of the characters come into light clearly focused. The mother “lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world outside of which he had never seen her set foot” realizes her son (Convergence). The transport, the bus, which carries the whites and the blacks without any discrimination becomes the stage on which the convergence is enacted, finally leading to the tragic death of the mother.

The sight of the cap and the dress of the black woman irritate the white mother because they do not reflect the segregation, and her sense of patronizing the blacks in the form of offering money also boomerangs. ““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””, reminds her son (Convergence). The son, though he has accepted desegregation, is also not able to strip his modern views and converge to preserve the mother-son relationship.

In “Good Country People” Connor makes her theme more complex, though here again the story is about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. It is complex because a daughter with an artificial leg, but possessing a philosophical mind, struggles to experience joy, though her name is ironically Joy. With Nitcshe deep in her blood, and with her PhD in philosophy, everything is nothing in her life. The artificial leg is highly symbolic in the story as it