SOURCE: "Julian's Journey into Hell: Flannery O'Connor's Allegory of Pride," in Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 171-9.

In the following essay, McDermott discusses Julian and his loss of faith in O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

In Flannery O'Connor's abrasive allegory "Everything That Rises Must Converge," Julian Chestny runs vainly from his soul's imminent dissolution as the story reaches its inevitable climax. The fact that Julian "had lost his faith" is proven conclusively in the story's final scenes, where "his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow" is nothing less than his entrance into the world of hell, and where his pride, now dethroned, seeks to flee from the crippling abject image it finally has of itself.

The essential inevitability of the climax is an integral part of the studied structure of the work, which in its compactly interwoven, parable-like...