By Stephen Sparrow
"Parker's Back" was the last story Flannery O'Connor wrote. Caroline Gordon Tate recalled visiting O'Connor in hospital shortly before she died, and tells how O'Connor said she wasn't supposed to be working but then smiled and pulled from under her pillow a notebook in which she said she was putting the finishing touches to something. What she was touching up was "Parker's Back." I think it is easily her most profound short story, dealing as it does in a unique way with heresy3: the ultimate heresy if you like; viz. the idea that spirit and matter are separate and opposite manifestations of good and evil, and that Man is unable to approach God and God is unwilling to draw near to Man.
