[Flannery O'Connor's] major subjects are the struggle for redemption, the search for Jesus, and the meaning of "prophecy": All of these in an intensely evangelical Protestant South, where the need for Christ is expressed without shyness and where "prophecy" is intimately related to the ways in which men are daily challenged to define themselves. The literary problem raised by this peculiarity of "place" (though it may be located elsewhere as well, as a "need for ceremony," or a desperate desire to "ritualize" life) is neatly described as well by Miss O'Connor: she must, she says, define in unnaturally emphatic terms what would not otherwise be accepted, or what might be misunderstood. (pp. 81-2)

Miss O'Connor writes about intensely religious acts and dilemmas in a time when people are much divided on the question of what actually determines a "religious act." Definitions are not easy, and, frequently, what is being done with the utmost seriousness seems terribly naïve or simpleminded to the reader. She must, therefore, force the statement of it into a pattern of "grotesque" action which reminds one somewhat of Franz Kafka, at least in its violation of normal expectations.

We have the phenomenon of a Catholic writer describing a Protestant, an evangelical, world, to a group of readers who need to be forced or shocked and/or amused into accepting the validity of religious states. The spirit of evil abounds, and the premonition of disaster is almost invariably confirmed. Partly, this is because the scene is itself grotesquely exaggerated (though eminently plausible at the same time); partly it is because Christian sensibilities have been not so much blunted as rendered bland and oversimple. (p. 82)

Another truth about Miss O'Connor's fiction is its preoccupation with the Christ figure, a use of Him that is scarcely equalled by her contemporaries. (p. 83)

In almost all of Miss O'Connor's fiction, the central crisis involves a confrontation with Jesus, "the Christ." In the manner of Southern Protestantism, these encounters are quite colloquial and intimate…. The so-called "grotesques" of Flannery O'Connor's fiction are most frequently individual souls, imbued with religious sentiments of various kinds, functioning in the role of the surrogate Christ or challenging Him to prove Himself. Not only for literary strategy, but because such manifestations are surreal, Miss O'Connor makes these acts weird demonstrations of human conduct: "irrational" in the sense of their taking issue with a rational view of events. (p. 84)

The basic struggle is with "Adam's sin," or—to put it in less portentous terms—the natural tendency of man to sin, against his conscience, a disapproving society, or whatever metaphor he chooses to identify with his aberrant ways. The Christ figure is liberally used, and there is little true identification with theological explanations of Him. He is a weight, a burden, a task, even an enemy. Miss O'Connor's first novel-length portrayal of His effects is Wise Blood (1952). Here, Jesus is the object of attack when He is subject to exploitation along the lines of a "con man," collecting fees for salvation from easy victims.

The novel is charged with death and burial imagery. Hazel Motes, returned from the War to a town that no longer exists, goes on to the city of Taulkinham, there to start a new Church, "Without Christ." On the train, he lies in an upper berth, which reminds him of coffins in his past…. He dreams, or half-dreams, of his grandfather, a circuit preacher, "a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger." Then he thinks of his father's burial: "He saw him humped over on his hands and knees in the coffin, being carried that way to the graveyard." (pp. 85-6)

Last things are with him as he moves toward Taulkinham, and "prophecy." Because his grandfather had always associated Jesus with sin, Motes decides that "the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin."… Hazel Motes is one of a series of religious rebels whose rebellion and contrition are deeply personal. He must convince his fellow-men that there is no Jesus, or at least that Jesus is not necessary to the moral life, in accents similar to those in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. (p. 86)

One of the more interesting facts of Wise Blood is its literally taking into account the necessity of redemption. In fact, in its own way, the novel describes in detail three stages of the journey to death: 1) the recognition of death (images of coffins and of long dark corridors and the "dark tunnel" … are corroborating evidence); 2) the rebellion against grace, against the idea of depending upon some figure or ikon, or supernatural being (this is, of course, as much as a rebellion against his grandfather as it is an act of violence against religion); and 3) self-immolation, or the individual move toward redemption. (p. 87)

Wise Blood presents a powerful, mad resistance to the familiar pathways to redemption. The intensity of Motes's personal reaction is a deliberate underscoring of the religious story. Motes must eventually give way, and he does so, but not before he has had several very shocking and absurd experiences. He is proved to be unequal to the task of controlling his own fate; and his death is a parody of the death of Jesus. (pp. 87-8)

There is so much of the extreme, the absurd, in Wise Blood, that it appears at least to be disjointed and all too simply plotted. Actually, every detail is part of a plan to portray the journey toward redemption in the setting of an extremely individualistic Protestant scene. (p. 89)

We must eventually discover the meaning of her quotation from Saint Matthew, used as an epigraph of her most brilliant work, The Violent Bear It Away: "From the Days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away." Violence is, virtually, a quality of the religious act in Miss O'Connor's fiction; it is also a signature of her characters' own personality, to testify to their approaching Jesus on their own initiative, after much and vigorous resistance, and their finally making a personal symbolic act in accepting him. In all of her fiction the way to salvation is dangerous, thorny, rocky, and devious; but there is this distinction, that her heroes put their own barriers in the way of achieving it. (p. 90)