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The Violent Bear It Away | Introduction

The Violent Bear It Away, published in New York in 1960, is Flannery O’Connor’s darkly humorous Gothic novel about a Southern boy’s spiritual awakening. It charts the spiritual and physical journey of fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater, raised by his great-uncle in the backwoods of Alabama to be a prophet. Tarwater travels to the city, where he struggles against the need to deny his spiritual inheritance and the call of God. O’Connor paints a macabre picture of Southern life and religious fundamentalism and parodies the blind selfassurances of modern secular thinking. The novel is unsettling because it offers no easy truths; its hero is an unlikable boy who learns that doing God’s work entails violence, unreason, even madness. It is not, as might be expected, a parody of religious fanaticism, but a psychological study of the mysterious, frightening, and sometimes offensive nature of the religious calling. Stark religious symbolism and Biblical allusions unite to explore themes of spiritual hunger, faith versus reason, and the battle for the soul. O’Connor wrote the novel over eight years while suffering from lupus, publishing the first chapter as a story, “You Can’t Be Poorer Than Dead,” in 1955. Her last major work to be published in her lifetime, The Violent Bear It Away contains elements found in much of O’Connor’s fiction. Her only other novel, Wise Blood (1952), fuses humor and horror to examine questions of faith, suffering, family relationships, and intellectual versus religious understanding. The novel was not particularly well received when it first appeared; many critics found it strange and impenetrable. But, to some extent because of O’Connor’s reputation as a master of the short story, the novel is now considered an important work in the Gothic tradition and acknowledged to be O’Connor’s best work of longer fiction.

The Violent Bear It Away Summary

Overview
The main action of The Violent Bear It Away is simple and occurs over seven days, but much of the novel consists of flashbacks that recall incidents in the lives of the main characters. As events are brought to mind through the memories of various individuals, the author provides insight into their psychological and spiritual natures, reveals the motivations behind their actions, and offers an intimate family history clouded by personal feelings, religious and intellectual beliefs, and emotional confusion. The novel is divided into three sections, each covering a period in Francis Marion Tarwater’s journey of spiritual self-discovery.

Chapters 1–3
The novel opens with the burial of Mason Tarwater, young Francis Marion Tarwater’s greatuncle, at his farm in rural Powderhead, Alabama. Although Tarwater will not learn this until the end of the novel, it is explained that Buford Munson, who has come to get his jug filled from old Tarwater’s still, has buried the old man in the proper Christian way because the nephew is passed out drunk. A history of this family is woven into the events that are taking place, but incidents are not described in order of their occurrence. What emerges is that old Tarwater considered himself a prophet. His religious teaching was that of a Christian fundamentalist who despised the trappings of secular modernity; he followed an ancient religious and moral code, and, like an Old Testament prophet, saw himself as a voice crying out in the wilderness. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital for four years, after which he stole his nephew, Rayber, from his parents. Rayber eventually rejected his uncle’s teachings, became a schoolteacher, and married Bernice Bishop, a social worker. Rayber’s pregnant cousin died in a car accident before she gave birth to Francis Marion, who Rayber took to raise.
After being released from the asylum, Mason lived with Rayber for a few months. Rayber studied him and wrote an article about him in a “schoolteacher magazine,” describing him as an allbut- extinct specimen—a religious fanatic. Outraged, Mason kidnapped Francis Marion from Rayber and raised him in the woods to be a prophet as well. Rayber and his wife attempted to retrieve young Tarwater from Powderhead, but gave up after the old man shot Rayber twice, rendering him almost completely deaf (he uses a mechanical hearing device). After this incident, old Tarwater promised Rayber: “THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN.” Rayber and his wife had a mentally disabled child, Bishop, whom Rayber has taken care of on his own after his wife left him. Mason tried and failed to kidnap Bishop, and Rayber refused to let the old man baptize Bishop, so the old man ordered Francis Marion to finish the job. He also instructed young Tarwater to bury him in the proper Christian way in anticipation of the Second Coming.

Tarwater is skeptical of his great-uncle’s teaching, rejecting the idea that he too is a prophet. As Tarwater had set about... » Complete The Violent Bear It Away Summary