Overview

"First published in 1960, ""The Violent Bear It Away"" is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle--that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensues: Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more ""reasonable"" modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul. O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writers acutely alert to where the sacred lives and to where it does not."

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In her first novel - Wise Blood and in a collection of short stories - A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O'Connor manifested, along with her obvious talent, a penchant for the grotesque. If one wishes, this novel - an exercise in the macabre - can be read as an allegory: a struggle for a soul, a conflict between evils. When his great uncle died at the breakfast table Francis Marion Tarwater, 14, too drunk to bury him, fired his house and set out for the city to find out how much of what the old man had told him was true. The old man, who said he was a prophet, had kidnapped the boy from his uncle, baptized him, and raised Tarwater to expect the Lord's call himself. Rayber, Tarwater's uncle, a schoolteacher, had, himself, received the old man's indelible mark but he had repudiated his fate and married a woman from the Department of Welfare, twice his age. They had one child: an idiot. When Tarwater met the schoolteacher's dim and ancient idiot. When Tarwater met the schoolteacher's dim and ancient idiot child, Bishop, he knew that he was expected to baptize him - to carry on his great uncle's mission. The battle begins: between the schoolteacher's belief in nothing and the old man's fanaticism. Finally Tarwater succumbs to the tide of his heritage, baptizes and drowns Bishop and goes forth to the dark city where the children of God lay sleeping . As a specialist in southern horror stories Miss O'Connor's attitude has been wry, her preferences perverse, her audience special. (Kirkus Reviews)

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