| "Parker's Back" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Flannery O'Connor | |
 A Byzantine Christ Pantocrator with expressive eyes — Church of Dormition in Daphni, Greece. | |
| 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 |
"Parker's Back" is a Southern gothic short story by American author Flannery O'Connor about the efforts of a worldly tattooed Southern man to demonstrate his love for a fundamentalist Christian woman whom he courts and marries but never understands why he stays with her. After a self-indulgent, disordered, and carefree life, the story's protagonist accepts God's grace and fulfills the meaning of his given name, Obadiah, but his wife with her Old Testament beliefs rejects grace in the form of Jesus Christ tattooed on her husband's back. The work was published in 1965, in her final short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. André Bleikasten, a scholar who studied Southern American writers and their works, said "'Parker's Back' belongs with O'Connor's most explicitly religious stories" as well as “one of her most enigmatic and gripping texts”.[1]