One of the things that fascinates me most about Flannery O’Connor is the way she dismantles not people, but the stories they tell themselves about who they are. In The Enduring Chill, Asbury returns from New York to his mother’s farm convinced that he is dying. But to him, illness is more than a diagnosis. It has become the final chapter of his own legend. He has already written the farewell letter his mother is to read after his death. He has already imagined the moment when she will finally understand what kind of artist she failed to recognize. He is not so much preparing to die as directing his own death.For much of the story, this is almost comic. Asbury experiences everything as literature. His mother is expected to play the provincial woman who destroyed her gifted son. The doctor is there to confirm the tragic diagnosis. The illness gives him what life never did: an ending.

But O’Connor sets another trap. She doesn’t dismantle his plot. She dismantles the myth the plot was written to prove. Life has no obligation to conform to the story we invent about ourselves.

What interests me most, though, is how this fits into the pattern of O’Connor’s other stories. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, grace arrives through murder. In Good Country People, it comes through humiliation. Here, it comes through the collapse of an artistic pose.

Asbury has arranged everything carefully: the illness, the letter, the misunderstood artist, the devastated mother. Then the structure gives way. He is left without the ending he had prepared for himself.

Grace begins there.

The story seems to suggest that even illness cannot be turned into a work of art about oneself. The real trial begins when you have to go on living.