Flannery O’Connor did not write to describe beautiful rooms or people living happily ever after; she wrote about the circus, the asylum – the spaces humans have created since the beginning. Wise Blood was her wild, twisted roller coaster ride view of it all. She was determined to show people the faces of the despairing, the fallen, the pretenders and what they looked like in all their predictability, farce and tragedy. Flannery O’Connor hits the reader over the head with a figurative cleaver in Wise Blood and opens them up to the frozen depths of spiritual apathy. She was a transformational Catholic writer from the Protestant South bent on shocking her readers - showing them the truth of who they were – lost souls – through her main character, …show more content…
Her world was the world of the Mad Hatter with Southern, fundamentalist tendencies or Alice and the Queen slithering down the rabbit hole while running a meth lab. Her characters were of biblical proportions. They were more than memorable; they were burned into the brain. One could say her main character was not unlike Jonah, Moses, or Saint Paul – running away from being saved or on their way to being saved – and sometimes not sure which. Hazel Motes fits the bill …show more content…
But Flannery does not spell out his epiphany for the oblivious she painstakingly reveals it through his actions. She lets the reader follow between the lines and then chew on it. Motes’ conversion is not done up in flowery words but found in excruciatingly painful actions. Flannery sympathizes with Motes’ pointless effort to escape from the “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind.” (Author’s Note in Wise Blood) She likes his stubbornness. The Unmoved Mover preoccupies Motes’ unstable mind and tortured soul and ultimately Motes lets his guard down. And that is why Flannery writes about a character like Motes. She admires his fervor, his spunk, his Jonah like behavior, and ultimately his ability to face reality. Hazel Motes is no lukewarm worm. But in the end, as Francis Thompson predicted in The Hound of Heaven, God was never to be denied. Hazel Motes was ultimately reconciled to his role as the lost sheep, the prodigal son, the wayward soul, and would have appreciated the words in the poem, “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest.”(The Hound of Heaven, lines 180 – 181) Motes had been blind, arrogant and pickled in hypocrisy and because of that underwent a painful renovation. He learned in his humiliation, grace transforms all, reveals
Flannery O’Connor once noted that all good stories are ones of conversion (Wood, 217), and Wise Blood is no exception. The central spiritual struggle of the book is that of the character Hazel Motes. The protagonist goes through not simply one but several conversions throughout the book. His spiritual quest is his realization of the Church Without Jesus, and his search for a new jesus. As analysis in this paper will elucidate, Hazel spiritual arc is a critique of approaches to knowing God. The first such method, nihilism, is a belief in nothing. This exists not only as a rejection of belief in an areligious sense, but is an active love of the concept of nothing itself. The second method comes in the debate of how one can come to know God, and whether or not one can accumulate concrete knowledge as a method of understanding the divine. O’Connor, as a Catholic, creates the window of an outsider to view the Protestant dominated South. From a Catholic perspective, Hazel Motes’s quest for an alternative approach to God is one which mirrors the alternative approach to God by the predominantly Protestant South. Hazel’s rejection of his paternal influences is not one which rejects religion or God, but instead is one which seeks his own path towards God based on his terms and conditions, and not His. Hazel’s spiritual trajectory is one which pursues a path of nihilism, to Gnosticism, to despair. His understanding of his own perception, especially sight, leads him to search for Jesus through both sight and non-sight, as he seeks a knowable, corporeal new jesus.
One of her most famously known works would be the novel Wise Blood. The protagonist may be one of the most grotesque characters of them all. Hazel Motes is described as having “a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth” and eyes with “settings so deep that they seemed to her, almost like passages leading somewhere”. The man is said to be in
Allen, William Rodney. "The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 58:2 (1986): 256-270.
Dumas, Jacky, and Jessica Hooten Wilson. "The Unrevealed In Flannery O'connor's 'Revelation'.(Critical Essay)." The Southern Literary Journal 2 (2013): 72. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
In the short story “Revelation”, Flannery O’Connor shows that self-discovery can be a painful but ultimately rewarding process to go through. The story is written in third-person and feels like it has no rising action and then out of the blue a climax comes. The characters in this story are not very likable, especially the protagonist Mrs. Turpin. She is an egotistical, self-praising woman whom O’Connor describes as a big. Her image of herself is of a person who is blessed by God above all others. She uses the pastime of “naming classes” to reassure herself of her place in the world and that none is above her in God’s eyes.
Flannery O’Connor was born on March 25, 1925 in Georgia. She was the only child to her parents, Edward and Regina O’Connor. Two years away from Flannery’s adulthood , her father passed away due to a rare disease, lupus. At the time of her father’s death O’Connor was in Milledgeville, Ga. It can be inferred that she was able to cope up with her father’s death very soon as she didn’t speak of his death much and also resumed to be an active part of her high school’s extra-curricular activities such as painting, English club and also band. A year after her father’s demise she graduated from high school and enrolled herself in Georgia State College to do major in English and sociology. It was during this period that she adapted the name ‘Flannery’. After getting bachelor degree from college she relocated to Iowa City where she attended University of Iowa and also applied for a job as teacher within the campus of her university. In the year of 1947, she eventually obtained her Masters degree in the field of Fine Arts. In spite of the fact that she obtained her Masters degree in 1947, her first work, “The Geranium” was published a year before that and it was just the dawn of her fame. It was merely an origination of the classics that followed later on. Lupus was genetically acquired by O’Connor from her father. Things were going well until end of 1950 in which she was struck by a severe lupus attack. O’Connor was determined about her writing and thus , even such a huge attack didn’t divert her attention off her passion of writing. There was no looking back for her as she kept on publishing her works. In point of fact , it was only after her attack, she produc...
Throughout all of Flannery O’Connor’s work, there are three dominant themes that show themselves: Christianity, irony, and grotesqueness. In nearly every story of hers, O’Connor is able to make a tragic story very grotesque in the way that she describes the events and characters of her story. [add more to introduction]
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood follows Hazel Motes’ attempt to abandon his religious beliefs and establish a “Church Without Christ”. Hazel Motes and many of the characters in Wise Blood seek material prosperity, but utilize religion as a means to reach such a goal. This perversion of Christianity for materialistic objectives prevents the characters’ redemption from Christ. Specifically in the case of Motes, it is not until he has lost everything material that he finally accepts Jesus’ divine grace. The grotesque characters exist to display the distortion of moral purpose that materialism brings. The symbols in Wise Blood focus solely on materialistic desires, this symbolism effectively displays how much the characters rely on materialism in
Burke, William. "Protagonists and antagonists in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor." The Southern Literary Journal 20 (1988): 99.
Flannery O’Connor grew up in the 1940s which was a time when America was rapidly changing. At this time there was a great divide in class structure. This dramatic separation of classes instilled a sense of superiority and hypocrisy in the minds of the upper class individuals. The attitudes of O’Connor’s characters in “Revelation” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” reveal a lot about the tainted mindset of those living in the south during that time. In both stories Flannery O’Connor is able to juxtapose the superior and hippocratic attitudes of upper with the attitudes of the lower class people during this civil war period.
O’Connor consciously constructs both Julian Chestny and his mother to participants of convergence and yet incapable of coalescence because of their distortion of self and reality, in part because they live in a world that supports this pretense. From the outset of the story, O’Connor builds an inane world through Julian’s limited view. Julian and his mother set out into a sky of “dying violet,” the start of their journey to reduction marked by the ending of a what should be a beautiful bloom—this imparts an uncanny sense of foreclosure to a beginning (406). Here, O’Connor already portends that their style and approach to building
Flannery O’Connor’s use of the protagonist in the three stories “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, and “Revelation” are all expressed through characters that do not fit the typical protagonist mold. As you will see the three protagonists have many similarities. Mrs. Turpin and Julian’s mothers similarities are out in the open and easy to recognize. On the other hand the grandmother’s similarities are more subdued, but she does share them with the other women.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to take time to read and work with the fiction of Flannery O 'Connor, cannot fail to be impressed by the level of quality in its production. According to Michael Meyer in his book The Bedford Introduction to literature, “Despite her brief life and relatively modest output her work is regarded among the most distinguished American fiction of the mid-twentieth century.” She wrote two novels and a total of thirty one short stories (420). Critics, reviewers, including sophisticated readers use the word powerful to describe her work. Firstly because of its quality, for example the mordantly comic characters, the strong narrative lines and the violence which are depicted so brilliantly. Secondly the totality of her vision and the entire expression of her imagination are combine to generate her literary power (Asal, 1). During her brief career the most predominant form of writing for Flannery was short stories, what exactly is a
Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith shows heavily in her writing’s, but yet most of her characters are Protestant. Protestants fall under Western churches, and follow the principle of Reformation. Flannery wants her characters to suffer, to feel anguish and find redemption. While Flannery O’Connor has written many complex texts with different themes, her faith is always the fueling force behind her creativity. Contrary to popular belief, O’Connor’s notions have only widened her points of view in her writings. O’Connor uses faith in her work to show the readers spirituality and grace.
In addition to her Southern upbringing, another influence on the story is Flannery O'Connor's illness. She battled with the lupus disease which has caused her to use a degree of violence and anger to make her stories somewhat unhappy. The illness caused a sadness inside of Flannery O'Connor, and that inner sadness flowed from her body to her paper through her pen. Although she was sick, O'Connor still felt proud to be who she was. By comparison, Mrs. Turpin in “ Revelation” has a good disposition about herself. She is far from perfect, yet she is happy to be who she is.