SOURCE: Napier, James J. “Flannery O'Connor's Last Three: ‘The Sense of an Ending’.” Southern Literary Journal 14, no. 2 (spring 1982): 19-27.

In the following essay, Napier evaluates O'Connor's literary output in the last few years of her life, focusing on the achievement of her last three stories: “Revelation,” “Judgment Day,” and “Parker's Back.”

“Ends are ends only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent.”

—Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 175.¹

A casual look at the record of Flannery O'Connor's career reveals a precocious beginning followed by an early success that was sustained for almost two decades until her death in 1964. From the publication of her first story in Accent when she was a student at the School for Writers at the State University of Iowa until the completion of “Parker's Back” in the last month of her life, she seems to...