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A review by jnepal
3 By Flannery O'Connor: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor
5.0
This was my introduction to Flannery O'Connor. I was impressed and delighted. However, if you do not or are unable to appreciate the morbid side of life then you will not enjoy her writing. She did not write about the darkness for the thrill of it, that would be gross, she wrote morbid tales to awaken us to the light. To appreciate her writing we must understand her motivation.
Wise Blood was a story about a man obsessed with God, with Jesus Christ, and no matter how he consciously attempted to kill God in his mind Mr. Motes could not dispel the reality of Jesus Christ in his soul. Eventually Hazel Motes blinds himself as a last act to try to purge himself of his inability to escape the image of the Christ. Hazel's landlady near the end of the story says to him in reference to a restaurant, "You'll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It's you that can't see Mr. Motes." He could see, but he did not want to see. Ultimately, then, Hazel really was blind even though he saw.
The next novel was The Violent Bear it Away. Three generations of men reject Christ. Each one rejects Christ, but all take different paths. Once again the focus on Christ manifests the need the characters had for Christ, for the true Christ. But they bore it away because they rejected Him, they were unable to reject Christ peacefully.
The rest of the book contained a compilation of some of O'Connor's short stories. Two scenes from two of these stories jumped out to me. One was a scene in which a widowed middle-aged woman who owned a farm was gored to death by a bull, at which point she finally saw the light, finally saw how she should have lived her life as she was being pierced by the horns of the bull. The other was about a 14 year old boy, homeless and deviant, who was taken in by an atheist welfare worker. At dinner the boy stands up with a Bible in his hands and begins to tear out pages of paper and eating them saying, "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!"
Wise Blood was a story about a man obsessed with God, with Jesus Christ, and no matter how he consciously attempted to kill God in his mind Mr. Motes could not dispel the reality of Jesus Christ in his soul. Eventually Hazel Motes blinds himself as a last act to try to purge himself of his inability to escape the image of the Christ. Hazel's landlady near the end of the story says to him in reference to a restaurant, "You'll pick up an infection. No sane person eats there. A dark and filthy place. Encrusted! It's you that can't see Mr. Motes." He could see, but he did not want to see. Ultimately, then, Hazel really was blind even though he saw.
The next novel was The Violent Bear it Away. Three generations of men reject Christ. Each one rejects Christ, but all take different paths. Once again the focus on Christ manifests the need the characters had for Christ, for the true Christ. But they bore it away because they rejected Him, they were unable to reject Christ peacefully.
The rest of the book contained a compilation of some of O'Connor's short stories. Two scenes from two of these stories jumped out to me. One was a scene in which a widowed middle-aged woman who owned a farm was gored to death by a bull, at which point she finally saw the light, finally saw how she should have lived her life as she was being pierced by the horns of the bull. The other was about a 14 year old boy, homeless and deviant, who was taken in by an atheist welfare worker. At dinner the boy stands up with a Bible in his hands and begins to tear out pages of paper and eating them saying, "I've eaten it like Ezekiel and it was honey to my mouth!"