Flannery O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge" tells the story of a middle-aged white lady, the descendant of an aristocratic slave-holding family in the deep south, that is on a journey to the YWCA to attend a "reducing class" that was recommended to lower her blood pressure. She insists that her son Julian, a quasi-intellectual, educated at "only a third-rate college", hypocritically consumed with disdain for his mother's racial bigotry, escort her to the Y …showed first 75 words of 827 total…

…showed last 75 words of 827 total…direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge." (Henderson 1) In this story's violent climax, the characters have a chance at convergence or redemption. Julian loses his sense of supremacy over his mother and his feelings of separation as he watches her die. Julian's new found reality "carried him nowhere" and a "tide of darkness sweeps" him back to his mother as he enters a more realistic "world of guilt and sorrow."