The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

First published: 1960

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: 1952

Locale: Tennessee

Principal characters

• Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy trained to be a prophet
• George F. Rayber, his uncle
• Mason Tarwater, Francis’s great-uncle
• Bishop Rayber, Francis’s cousin
• Bernice Bishop Rayber, Francis’s aunt, George’s wife
• Buford Munson, a neighbor
• T. Fawcett Meeks, a traveling salesman
• Lucette Carmody, a child evangelist

The Story:

Mason Tarwater, great-uncle of Francis Marion Tarwater, has died at the breakfast table one morning. The old man had spent years training his nephew, with whom he lived in a backwoods spot called Powderhead, how to bury him properly. As young Francis Tarwater begins to prepare for the burial, he recalls events from his life with Old Tarwater and the various reasons he does not want to follow in the old man’s footsteps. Young Tarwater recalls that the old man had kidnapped him from the home of his uncle, George F. Rayber, and provided a fundamentalist education quite different from the education the boy would have received in public school. Young Tarwater also recalls the old man’s stories about his life as a prophet and his failed attempts to save relatives other than his great-nephew, notably Rayber, whom Old Tarwater kidnapped at age seven; Rayber rejected the old man’s preaching and later tried to get young Tarwater back. Old Tarwater would tell his great-nephew that he shot Rayber in the leg and ear to prevent the boy’s being taken away by Rayber and the woman who became his wife, Bernice Bishop.

Old Tarwater was pleased that Rayber and Bernice had only one child and that the child, Bishop Rayber, was an idiot, for idiocy would protect the boy from Rayber’s foolish ideas. Young Tarwater remembers that he had been ordered by Old Tarwater to accept the mission of baptizing little Bishop. He also remembers a trip to the city with Old Tarwater, who found out from lawyers that he could not take Powderhead from Rayber and give it to young Tarwater; it was on this day that young Tarwater got the only glimpse of both Rayber and Bishop that he could remember while living with Old Tarwater.

As Tarwater starts to dig the old man’s grave, he hears a stranger’s voice. When two black people, a woman and Buford Munson, interrupt Tarwater’s digging to have him fill their jugs with liquor, Tarwater goes to Old Tarwater’s still and gets drunk. The stranger’s voice encourages young Tarwater to go his own way. After being scolded by Buford, Tarwater falls asleep, and Buford buries Old Tarwater in accordance with the old man’s wishes. When young Tarwater awakes, he burns down the house, thinking Old Tarwater’s body is still in it, and runs off toward the city.

A traveling salesman, T. Fawcett Meeks, picks up the hitchhiking Tarwater on the highway, lectures him about loving customers, hard work, and machines, and delivers him to the home of Rayber. While being transported by Meeks, Tarwater remembers Old Tarwater’s stories of Rayber’s life, especially how Rayber arranged for his sister to take a lover and give birth to Tarwater and how Rayber once betrayed Old Tarwater by writing up their conversations as a case study for a magazine. Old Tarwater’s kidnapping of Francis Tarwater followed his reading of Rayber’s article.

When Rayber takes young Tarwater into his home, they seem very strange to each other. Tarwater sees Rayber’s hearing aid as a sign that Rayber is a mechanical man; Rayber sees the old man’s influence all over young Tarwater. Rayber’s son, Bishop, is immediately friendly, but Tarwater rejects the little boy. Rayber sets out on a campaign to introduce Tarwater to the city and the modern world. Tarwater is thoroughly unimpressed with the modern world, but he does sneak out of the house one night, and Rayber follows to find out what Tarwater likes. They end up at a Pentecostal church, where a child evangelist, Lucette Carmody, starts to direct her sermon at the astonished Rayber. The next day, Rayber tries taking Tarwater to the city park. While there, Rayber remembers how he had once tried to drown Bishop. Then Rayber notices Tarwater is about to baptize Bishop in the park’s fountain and stops him. Later, Tarwater’s memory of the park trip reveals that Tarwater’s stranger/friend had encouraged him to drown Bishop.

After the trip to the park, Rayber next tries to get through to Tarwater by taking him fishing. While the two are out on the lake in a boat, Rayber’s analysis of Tarwater’s mind causes Tarwater to vomit, jump from the boat, and swim to shore. Rayber plans to surprise Tarwater with a visit to Powderhead to make him confront feelings about his past, but when Rayber goes to Powderhead in advance to prepare, he realizes that he cannot bear to return with Tarwater. Back at the lake, Rayber allows Tarwater to take Bishop out in a boat; in his cabin, Rayber collapses as he senses that Tarwater is drowning his son. Fleeing from the lake, Tarwater plans to take possession of Powderhead, as he tells the sleepy truck driver who gives him a ride. Tarwater admits to baptizing Bishop but denies that the act has any significance. After being dropped off, Tarwater is picked up by a man who gives him a smoke, drugs him to sleep with liquor, and rapes him.

When Tarwater awakes, he burns the woods around where the rape occurred, then heads toward Powderhead. He burns more woods when he hears his stranger/friend’s voice again. When he reaches Powderhead, he encounters Buford, who explains that Old Tarwater was properly buried after all. Now Tarwater has a vision of his own role as a prophet, and instead of remaining at Powderhead, he heads back toward the city.

Bibliography

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Examines O’Connor’s attraction to polar oppositions. Emphasizes the Christian sacramentalism, psychology, and use of doubles in The Violent Bear It Away as well as the differences between O’Connor’s two novels.

Bacon, Jon Lance. Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Treats O’Connor as a southern critic of nationalistic Cold War culture in the United States. Asserts that The Violent Bear It Away represents a rejection of cultural pressures to conform in terms of politics, public education, consumerism, and religion.

Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. University of Tennessee, 2002. Painstakingly researched chronicle of O’Connor’s life depicts her as a very private, odd, and self-contained woman, devoted to Catholicism and to her writing.

Darretta, John. Before the Sun Has Set: Retribution in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Focuses on the biblical ideas of retribution, salvation, and grace in O’Connor’s fiction, including The Violent Bear It Away.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Distinguishes between O’Connor and her narrator in The Violent Bear It Away in an effort to answer the claim that O’Connor wrote from the devil’s point of view. Discusses O’Connor’s typescripts and emphasizes Rayber’s similarity to other characters.

Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Little, Brown, 2008. Biography provides much critical analysis of O’Connor’s fiction, both the individual works and the scope of the author’s career. Argues that despite the fact that she wrote two novels, O’Connor was not really a novelist but was perhaps the greatest twentieth century American short-story writer.

Hendin, Josephine. The World of Flannery O’Connor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Controversial but important early study generally downplays religious explanations of O’Connor’s works. Treats The Violent Bear It Away as an examination of a failed initiation into manhood in which the protagonist finally reverts to a painfully childish role.

Johansen, Ruthann Knechel. The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Emphasizes the structures in O’Connor’s texts and examines the apocalyptic nature of those texts as well as the role of the trickster figures. Compares O’Connor’s two novels to each other and to biblical narratives.

Kirk, Connie Ann. Critical Companion to Flannery O’Connor. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Provides a good introduction to O’Connor’s fiction. Includes a concise biography, entries on O’Connor’s two novels and other works, with subentries on her characters, and entries about her friends, literary influences, and the places and themes of her fiction.