The literary work of these authors can never be defined by a single relationship in their lives. The setting of each story offers evidence of feelings of resentment towards the authors' state of confinement. All That Rises Must Converge, like most of O'Connor's stories, is set in the South. The conflicted and often ironically dark social environment he depicts is immediately recognizable as O'Connor's creation. Most of his characters are a product of their time and place, and many of them are seen desperately clinging to the ignorance and outdated ways of the past. In fact, Julian's mother, like "the grandmother" in A Good Man is Hard to Find, is not specifically identified or named. It is as if “the old woman” and “the grandmother” could be any Southern mother or grandmother. O'Connor describes this reality with obvious satire and disgust in a way that indicates how she may have been personally affected by it. It is very likely that she felt, as critic Ann E. Rueman states, “bottled up by Southern codes of silence and Catholic respect for the elderly, and aggravated by dependence on her mother with no hope of change in her status. . .” (537), and he let much of this frustration seep through his work. Kafka, in contrast, does not explore such a broad context in his story The Metamorphosis. The entire story is set in the family home, specifically in Gregor's bedroom. Over the course of the story, his room becomes a prison; Gregor even resorts to hiding himself under a sofa while his sister is in the room. As an invalid in his family's home, he becomes increasingly confined to his immediate surroundings:. . . with each passing day his vision of distant things became more confused; the hospital in the center of the paper...what happens to them is completely inseparable from their belated revelations and awakenings. The three stories mentioned above all deal with the social, racial, and especially religious aspects of the human experience. Along with these factors, it explores pride, conceit and ignorance. Most of his characters are morally ambiguous, a mixture of good and bad. As writers, neither Franz Kafka nor Flannery O'Connor received sincere approval from their parents regarding their art. While this fact in no way hindered their desire or ability to create beautifully disturbing works, there is evidence that it left bitter feelings. In the letter to his father Kafka states: “you struck a better blow when you aimed at my writing, and hit, unconsciously, everything that came with it. . . but my writing was concerned with you, there I only complained about what I could not complain about your breasts.”