Judgement Day (short story)

This article is about the Gothic story. For the similarly-titled science fiction story, see Judgment Day (short story).

"Judgement Day"
Short story by Flannery O'Connor
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Southern Gothic
Publication
Published in	Everything That Rises Must Converge
Publication type	single author anthology
Publication date	1965

"Judgement Day" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1965 in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor finished the collection during her final battle with lupus. She died in 1964, just before her final book was published. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work. "Judgement Day" contains many similarities to one of O'Connor's earliest short stories, "The Geranium."

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

— Flannery O'Connor

Plot summary

Tanner is an old white man from Georgia who has gone to live with his daughter in New York City after a doctor of mixed white and black ancestry purchases the land on which Tanner and his friend Coleman, an African American, had been squatting in Georgia. Out of pride, Tanner refuses to operate a distillery on the land for the doctor and instead chooses to move in with his daughter who thinks he should leave his shack in Georgia.

Tanner takes pride in his history of dealing with African Americans and remembers his first encounter with Coleman when he was going to threaten him with a pen knife as he did most of the other African Americans who were working with him. Instead of doing this he handed Coleman a pair of hand-whittled eye glasses and they later developed a close friendship. When Tanner tries befriending his African American neighbor in New York and calls the native New Yorker neighbor "preacher," Tanner's motivations are misinterpreted, and the neighbor attacks Tanner, causing him to have a debilitating stroke. While recovering Tanner seeks assurance from his daughter that she will eventually bury him in Georgia and not New York. She agrees but he overhears her saying that she will not do so. Although somewhat disabled, Tanner tries escaping back to Georgia but collapses in the stairwell. He fantasizes about being shipped home in a coffin while still alive and in his reverie mistakes his African-American neighbor for Coleman, who sticks his arms and legs through the spokes under the banister where he is later found dead. Tanner's daughter initially buries him in New York but eventually reburies him in Georgia when she feels overwhelming guilt about not following his wishes.

Themes

Flannery O' Connor utilizes significant themes such as religion and identity to represent the characters and the events in "Judgement Day". Throughout the short story, these themes are ingrained in crucial moments, illustrating O’Connor’s use of her own beliefs in her work. Sins and forms of salvation are widely illustrated in many of her works that are centered on God in the world.

Religion

Religion and faith are the main key themes seen in “Judgement Day”. O’Connor utilizes her connection and faith in Christianity, more importantly, her devotion to the beliefs of Roman Catholicism, to emphasize the story and its symbolism of death and “going home”. Writer for Renascence Micheal O'Connell writes that "Judgement Day" displays religion as a central theme as it shows Tanner finding hope in God. O'Connell states "In the published version, O'Connor's revisions emphasize Tanner's sense of hope. Although he is aware that he is at the mercy of forces beyond his control, he responds to this by placing his faith in God." Toward the end of the story, Tanner then leaves his daughter’s apartment, quoting scripture from Psalm 23, then he “tries to act in such a way that God will be able to come to him. By attempting to leave New York and return to Georgia, even though he knows he almost certainly will not make it back alive, Tanner is acting decisively and claiming some amount of agency for himself and is also opening himself up to God’s providence.” O'Connor suffered from the lasting effects of lupus in the last 13 years of her life, often relating characters in her writing in a way that shares similar struggles as well as a shared faith. O'Connell states that many describe "'Judgement Day' being not only the culmination of O'Connor's career, but, in a sense, the culmination of her faith as well. The story serves as an affirmation of one of the most fundamental tenets of her faith: that death is not a desolation but rather a homecoming that can be approached with joy." O’Connor ties in her own religious beliefs to the story as “She draws a distinction between a physical location and the eternal home that the Christian seeks, which in turn is an echo of the Catholic belief in the Church as ‘a pilgrim people’ journeying back to the heavenly homeland. Clearly, Tanner’s desire to get back to Georgia – ‘dead or alive’ – has more to do with O’Connor’s notion of the ‘eternal and absolute’ country than with the physical land Tanner no longer owns” This connection between herself and Tanner is “a reflection of O’Connor’s beliefs about her own spiritual journey. Despite his numerous physical afflictions, Tanner is able to make it home.” To add more emphasis to this, “O’Connor underscores this spiritual homecoming by having Tanner’s daughter, against her initial inclinations, bury her father in Georgia. The old man’s body is both physically and spiritually at home.”

Identity and Race

Identity and race are the other key themes in this story, seen throughout the interactions Tanner has with other characters. Focusing on how Tanner sees himself compared to the African American characters, he uses many racial stereotypes when he addresses or speaks to those characters. In an article for Flannery O'Connor Review, Doreen Fowler analyses the use of race and identity in "Judgement Day" by comparing Tanner to the African American characters. Fowler explains that "O'Connor focuses intensively on the cultural formation of hierarchical racial identities." Fowler also adds that "Tanner identifies himself by means of a white-black tension" This being due to Tanner's disassociation between how race is handled in the north compared to back in Georgia. In multiple instances in the story, Tanner imagines Coleman right behind him, following him wherever he goes. Creating the imagery of a shadow that lingers behind Tanner, illustrating that “the image visualizes language’s relational meanings: Tanner needs the black man behind him to establish his own primacy” Fowler continues, “The shadow is, of course, an image for the double, the alter ego or other self.” And “the text implies that Coleman is Tanner’s denied self and that only Tanner’s denial – both psychological and cultural – separates white from black” At the moment in the story where Tanner calls out to an African American man who is his neighbor, calling him a preacher, but knows nothing about the man, not even his name. Tanner assumes the man is from South Alabama and is a preacher, neither of which is true. He simply labeled the man due to racial stereotypes. “Outraged, the other man struggles to define himself and to reject the southerner’s racial stereotypes” and that “for Tanner, race difference is immutable, natural law, and race entirely defines their relationship.” Sometime later in the story, Tanner had fallen down the stairs when the actor found him. Fowler writes, “At one level, Tanner, who now looks like ‘a man in the stocks,’ is judged for his racism. At a symbolic level, when the actor thrusts Tanner through the spokes of the staircase banister, he shows the other man how it feels to be pigeon-holed by culture’s system of relational meanings.” Even at the end of the story, “Tanner is trying to raise himself up, just as, symbolically, throughout the story he has been trying to establish his ascendancy as a white man” This story, among so many others, raises the question: Why is being black or white such a significant and distressing contrast? Fowler writes that the story “addresses precisely this question and reveals that difference, particularly racial difference, is a cultural artifact, produced by enforced separation and subordination, in an attempt to make living beings conform to language’s rigid either/or definitions”