In Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, the reader is met with two main characters: Julian and his mother. Throughout the entire story the reader is given time to analyze these two characters. Depending on the person, opinions will often vary greatly. It is blatant that Julian's mother is a typical racist based solely on the life that she grew up in. From the beginning Julian comes off as a great person, taking his ill mother to her reducing class for the sake of her health and safety. However, with further reading and analysis, that is not the full truth. In his own mind, Julian is a much better person than his mother, but in reality he is just as bad, if not worse.

As the story goes through its course, one will notice all of the times that Julian shows absolute hate and disgust towards his own mother. It seems that everything that he does is in spite of her. He makes it his goal to make her life as miserable as possible. He spends the entire story doing things that he knows will get under her skin all for his own pleasure of making her mad. At one point he fantasizes about bringing home an African American woman as his love interest. Only he would wish for such detriment in his mother's eyes: "He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her" (242). He goes through several scenarios in his mind that would only bring displeasure to his mother. At a certain point he relishes in the fact that he was so angry with her that "he could with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child in his charge" (241). With all the spite he intends to bring on his mother, it is easy to believe that he hates her, despite all that she did for him, including getting him through college. However, he ignores the harsh truth of how alike he and his mother are.

While he thinks that he has a rather extended knowledge and outlook on the lives of those of other races, Julian turns out to be just as ignorant as his mother in racial awareness. While it seems like Julian was trying to become more adjusted to the integration, it was still all out of ignorance and spite: "When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins" (238). Even when Julian was alone he was still out to prove some kind of point to his mother that he was more knowledgeable than her. However, he was doing nobody any greater good just by sitting by someone of a different race. He did not do this to be less racist, he did it to infuriate his mother. In an attempt to demonstrate his lack of racism, he tries to connect with an African American man on the bus. However, he was not paying full attention to his surrounding and asked if the man had a match for his cigarette in a clearly posted no smoking area. To the man he seemed like he had no respect for the posted rules. When the "No Smoking" sign was pointed out to him, he recoiled, slightly embarrassed and leaving the man with an annoyed expression. This shows that even in his attempts to make some kind of connection with the man, he still acts like a completely different person around African Americans. Meaning that he is treating them with a different attitude and not seeing them as equal.

In another point Julian thinks how he would like to meet "...some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening. He would be entirely justified but her blood pressure would rise to 300" (242). This is just another example of how much Julian hates his mother and lives solely to get on her nerves. While he believes that he is not nearly as racist as his mother, Julian is also very racist and it shows as he tries to make an effort to speak to African Americans and purposely sits beside them. He does this not for the sake of his social reputation but to get on the nerves of his already racist mother. He does not see African Americans as other people, even though he thinks he does, he still views them as objects just like in times of slavery.

Julian is the prime example of ignorance. He demonstrates someone full of vengeance and evil. There is no proof of love, and if it were not for the fact that a human requires a heart to be living, one could assume that he did not have one. He shows no respect for his own mother, who put him through college and still allowed him to live with her after he graduated. She treated him with great care making sure he had what he needed. To repay her, he only tried to make her mad. He showed no remorse for her when she was turned down by anyone. When she met her demise with the African American woman with the hat, he simply laughed. He did not care about anyone but himself. It was his goal to come off as less racist than his mother, but he ultimately failed. In his own mind Julian believed he was well knowledgeable in the new integrated world, but his ignorance dominated. On the outside it seemed like he was trying to grow to the new ways of the world but with close inspection one can see that Julian was a racist, nothing more and nothing less. 

 However, Julian's racism does not go unnoticed in the cycle of karma. All of his vengeance towards his mother comes right back to him and he loses what he hates the most. In the end Julian fully understands what it means to not know what he has until it is gone. As soon he was done yelling at his mother for acting like a child she falls to the ground right before his eyes. He watches as the life slowly drains out of her. He is faced with all the guilt of everything that he put his poor mother through. Even though she did so much for him, he still hated her, and now she's gone in an instant. He cries out for his mother out of instinct because he knows that he has just lost such a precious asset to his life and he has to live with the fact that he did her so wrong, never being able to apologize. He was worse than his mother by trying to defeat her and in the end he lost the war. All the small battles he fought with her were nothing when it came to final war of life. He was left with only guilt and sorrow. 

