Review

Book: The Violent Bear it Away
Author: Flannery O'Connor

Objective: 7
Subjective: Undecided, but I think 8
MC: 7-8

This novel is very intense and dark. Flannery does an awesome job using descriptive language to represent spiritual or emotional situations. For example, "His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing". Spiritual Vacuity (Bailie)?? I think so.

I'm not totally sure about how this story depicts the faith, but there are two drastically opposing characters. A zelous and crazy prophet and a overly reasonable atheist. They hate each other. They are bitter enemies. At one point the atheist (depicts a life of self control, intelligence, self reliance) is bragging to the third character- the nephew of the crazy prophet...It's opposite of the gospel...
"It's you the seed feel in. It ain't a thing you can do about it. It fell on bad ground but it fell in deep. With me, he said, it fell on rock and the wind carried it away"! He thinks the seed is toxic.
Flannery uses strong irony throughout the whole story to depict this dichotomy.

The story also portrays the monotany and "lameness" of most men's lives. The 14yo boy is so proud that he was born in the midst of a car accident. His mother went into labor after being hit by a car. "He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happned to him so far".

Another theme: false prophecy, righteousness etc. "This fixatino of being 'called' by the Lord had its origin in insecurity. He needed the assurance of a call and so he called himself (to be a profit)".

Other themes were unexpected violence (title?) (Large destructive fires, drownings,), grotesque and desperate characters. The prophet was insane, the nephew was lost and grotesque, the little boy was dim-wited and a symbol of lifelessness, and the athiest was an emotional wreck- a wounded soul.

The character names were interesting. Tarwater (the 14yo boy) and Bishop (the younger 8 yo boy).

Harold Bloom said this:

"Her comic genuis is certainly part of the asnwere; someone who can enterain us so profoundly can damn us pretty much as she pleases".

"Her obsessive spirituality and absolute moral judgements cannot just sustain themselves at the reader's expense."

Reading The Violent Bear it Away, I am exhilarted to the brink of fear"


"And yet her verve and drive, the propulsive gusto of her comic spirit, is overwhelming. Her Catholicism might as well be Holy Rollerism, so far as the aesthetic effect of her fiction is concerned. There we can locate her natural shrewndess; her mad and damned American religionists can be parodied, but the parody will not touch her assured Roman Catholicism. More then a comedian of genius, she had also the pentrating insight that religion for her countryment and -women was not the opiate, but the rather the poetry of the people".