Wise Blood (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Flannery O’Connor
- First Published: 1952
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Novella
- Subjects: South or Southerners, Blindness or blind persons, 1940’s, Religion, Christianity, Preaching, Corruption, Martyrs or martyrdom, Prophecy or prophets, Zoos, Fanaticism
- Locales: South (U.S.), Alabama
Wise Blood was O’Connor's first novel; she began work on it while she was still in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It embodies most of her major themes, and it contains some of her best comedy. It is flawed, however, by her difficulties in pulling the two parts of the plot together. The Enoch Emery story is never fully integrated into the Hazel Motes story. O’Connor also had difficulties clarifying the issues about Motes's past that have turned him into what she called a “Christian malgre lui,” a Christian in spite of himself.
The novel opens on a train as...
[The entire page is 1966 words long]
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