Enduring Chill by Flannery O'Connor with Dr. Joseph Boyne

Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, Dcn. Garlick is joined by Dr. Joseph Boyne to discuss Flannery O'Connor's "Enduring Chill" as part of Short Story September.

Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule, articles, and a whole host of written guides.

Asbury Fox, the failed New York writer who returns home to his mother’s dairy farm convinced he is dying a tragic, Kafka-esque death, meets a rural doctor, two farmhands who refuse to share his resentment, and a deaf, one-eyed priest from Purrgatory who simply walks him through the Baltimore Catechism. What begins as another Southern Gothic confrontation with pride becomes something rarer in O’Connor: a dark comedy in which the protagonist desires of a romantic death are met with an enduring chill.

Dr. Boyne and Dcn. Garlick draw out the story’s autobiographical shadows, its critique of performative liberalism and abstract love of humanity, and the way O’Connor uses both the Jesuit in New York and the homely Father Finn to insist that meaning—and grace—cannot be manufactured from the self. The conversation lingers on the water-stain dove that descends as ice rather than fire, the question of whether the tale is comic or merely purgatorial, and what it means for those of us who prize the Great Books that education, by itself, is never enough.

Listeners who have been scarred by “The Lame Shall Enter First” will find this one far easier to finish—and far more unsettling in its quiet demand that we keep living.

Chapters

00:05 — Podcast intro and the reading plan for Short Story September

01:01 — Introducing Enduring Chill and Dr. Joseph Boyne

03:21 — Why Dr. Boyne picked the story

05:00 — Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic tradition

12:55 — The grotesque, violence, and grace in O’Connor

20:32 — Asbury returns home and the education theme

30:30 — Asbury’s desire for a meaningful death and the Jesuit in New York

41:42 — Dr. Block and Asbury’s confrontation with illness

50:00 — The dairy farm, the black workers, and failed communion

57:13 — Asking for a priest and the dream sequence

70:29 — Father Finn arrives and subverts Asbury’s expectations

80:31 — Randall and Morgan return

85:34 — Dr. Block diagnoses the illness correctly

87:40 — Final scene: the Holy Ghost in ice and the enduring chill

96:23 — Closing reflections on O’Connor and the story’s meaning

Keywords

Flannery O’Connor The Enduring Chill short story analysis, Ascend the Great Books Podcast Short Story September episode with Deacon Harrison Garlick and Dr. Joseph Boyne of Tulsa Community College, Southern Gothic literature, Catholic short stories, Christ-haunted South, Asbury Fox character study, Jesuit priest Ignatius Vogle, Father Finn from Purgatory, Baltimore Catechism, Holy Spirit as ice instead of fire, undulant fever raw milk irony, performative liberalism and racial condescension, education versus practical wisdom, grotesque as medium of grace, O’Connor comedy versus tragedy, Good Country People comparison, lupus and autobiographical elements, Great Books education critique, upcoming Plato Republic series, Robert E. Howard Red Shadows Solomon Kane, Neil Gaiman Chivalry with Archduke Eduard Habsburg, Herman Melville Bartleby the Scrivener.