Wise Blood
27. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Hazel Motes has always known that he’s fated to become a preacher like his grandfather, even though he doesn’t believe in Jesus, sin, or atonement. Yet even when he moves from his dead country hometown to the city, he still finds himself preoccupied with the idea of being redeemed. Eventually his destiny as a preacher catches up with him, and he forms a new church called the Church Without Christ. Yet he finds that, despite escaping from the old faith, he still has to defend this church from false prophets and greedy, hypocritical preachers. Hazel’s journey is a twentieth-century pilgrimage that illustrates the conflict between his desperate hope that Christianity is false and his sneaking suspicion that it might be true.
I don’t think I entirely understood this book. The characters are all extremely bizarre and unpleasant, and most of their actions are so strange that I was at a loss to interpret their meanings. Apparently this book is supposed to be a “comic” novel, but it’s a very unique type of comedy: O’Connor throws the most grotesque characters and situations into a setting of extreme realism, and this contrast is what creates the humor. The premise of this book is a very interesting one, in my opinion: Hazel is an unbeliever, but he still treats belief as a matter of life and death. Despite his insistence that Christianity is false, he mortifies his flesh like an ascetic monk. There’s a lot of food for thought in this book, but I’m not sure I really get it!