“A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge"

“A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" are two short stories written by Flannery O'Connor that have different plots at first glance. However, have many similar traits. These two stories involve many conflicts, but one conflict that both stories shared was how the characters in both stories failed to adapt to their environment and how the outside world has caused the death of the people close to them as well as going through a moment of realization. The character Julian from "Everything that Rises Must Converge" and the grandmother from "A Good Man is Hard to Find" share the trait of being egotistic. This is very easy to spot as both the grandmother and Julian have their own agenda underlying their every action. The best example of Julian's selfishness would be when he tries to speak to a black man on the bus. While he makes it look as if he is unprejudiced, in reality he is only trying to anger his mother. Also in this scene, he is actually showing how he is the same as his mother and has these false idealized visions. The grandmother's best example of egotism and manipulation would be when the family is already on their way to Florida. The grandmother uses the kids as tools to get back at her son for not going to Florida and to at least let her see a small artifact from her past in a shape of a house. However, she leads her family the wrong way literally and metaphorically in which she led them to the road of destruction. The egoism expressed by the two characters is the cause of conflict in the short stories and its tragic resolution. If not for Julian's constant attempts to anger his mother, she would never have gotten a heart attack. Also, if not for the grandmother continuously trying to go to Tennessee, which resulted in subconscious mistake of remembering a house to be in Florida when in reality it was in Tennessee, the family would not have been