Everything That Rises Must Converge

(Mary) Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) occupies one of the most prominent positions in the history of post-war American literature. In her lifetime she often was classified in the category of the new generation of Southern writers, alongside her contemporaries like Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, etc. To O'Connor, being a Catholic, and a Southerner and a writer are the crucial influences upon her life. Most of her works is set in the small towns and backwoods areas of the Southern "Bible Belt", but local color is only a vehicle for conveying her spiritual concern, namely to reveal the mystery of God' grace in everyday life. In this regard, she is an anomaly among post-World War II writers. In contrast to her two novels, O'Connor's short stories have been considered as her finest work.Nine out of the nineteen stories in her two collections end with death of one or two characters and the repetitious death has become one of O'Connor's major themes. Apart from being the consequence of the violent acts of her grotesque characters. Death has evolved into a motif linking with her religious belief, Southern heritage and personal experience. Besides, humor is employed by O'Connor as one effective technique to convey her unique vision of death in her stories.Based on textual analysis of the concrete death scenes in twelve short stories, this thesis intends to conduct a comprehensive study of O'Connor's treatment of death in terms of narrative pattern, domestic setting and symbolic system. Then it goes further to explore O'Connor's vision of death. A kind of humor to blend comic elements with horrible death scenes is treated as a major technique of getting across her writing intention to the reader is also examined here. To sum up, the thesis aims at analyzing O'Connor's short stories from a new perspective of studying her treatment of death and gaining a better comprehension of O'Connor's literary achievement, particularly for Chinese readers.