All the Questions You Ever Had About “Parker’s Back”

Another story in Flannery O’Connor’s collection of
short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge,
“Parker’s Back” is the narrative of Parker, a young
man married to a very bitter and ugly wife, who had
an experience of the transcendent when he was
young that he has been chasing ever since. He is finally
confronted by it in an image of Christ that he has
tattooed on his back, and he expects this image to
connect him to his wife, who has always claimed
to be a very...