Flannery O'Connor was an author extremely revered for his writing techniques which can be examined in almost all of his pieces, especially in: "Whatever arises must converge" and “Green Leaf”. Both of these stories focus on the two most controversial topics in the history of society: religion and race. And with that, “Everything That Arises Must Converge,” a short story in the collection Everything That Arises Must Converge, is a short story from the third-person point of view, set in the late 1960s; that of an elderly mother and her young adult son, Julian, on whom the story focuses. He is a college graduate who is too caught up in his self-proclaimed brilliant mind and knows that his mother is too bigoted to care about the integration of African Americans into white communities. The story moves forward with a discussion between the two about how African Americans really behave. In the meantime, he's helping her get to The Y for her weekly weight loss class. He often complains about his terribly ugly hat and his desire to return it, but he stubbornly gets on the bus while continuing to argue that African-American integration is wrong. After they get on the bus and white people make comments about missing black people, an African-American gentleman in a suit comes in and Julian sits next to him to try to spite his mother, and then an African-American lady comes in and his son who ironically wears evening dress. hat identical to Julian's mother. She is playful with the child but is seen as a racist when she tries to offer him a dime. She is denied when the child's mother sees it as an act of mercy and Julian thinks he has finally won the argument, but is cut short when his mother has a stroke. The story ends with Julian screaming for help. As this story focuses... in the center of the card... a leaf is good, and as the story comes to an end, Mrs. May is stabbed in the heart by the bull and turns out to have experienced the drastic change she needed as it almost seemed like he was whispering to the bull, “one last discovery” (467). This story seems to be a religious angle for O'Connor and is really where he fails with the story; it attempts levels of depth and meaning, but ends up only as a religious anecdote in the collection. In the end, “All That Rises Must Converge” boasts a deeper meaning, those multiple layers of themes and symbols, it is truly superior to “Greenleaf.” ” which simply offers a symbol and a moral. Both achieved their central goals of race and religion, but "Greenleaf" instead felt a little too much like a religious lesson slapped on the wrist. Works Cited Perrine Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense