Extension closedness of syzygies and local Gorensteinness of commutative rings

We refine a well-known theorem of Auslander and Reiten about the extension closedness of n-th syzygies over noether algebras. Applying it, we obtain the converse of a celebrated theorem of Evans and Griffith on Serre's condition (S_n) and the local Gorensteiness of a commutative ring in height less than n. This especially extends a recent result of Araya and Iima concerning a Cohen-Macaulay local ring with canonical module to an arbitrary local ring.