The Violent Bear It Away

“The boy sensed that this was the heart of his great-uncle’s madness, this hunger, and what he was secretly afraid of was that it might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and might strike some day in him and then he would be torn by hunger like the old man, the bottom split out of his stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life.”

The need for some holy communion with the Lord is repeatedly characterized as a hunger. For Mason, this hunger is the divine marker of the prophet. For Rayber, it is a mental illness he fears inheriting. Tarwater, meanwhile, is conflicted about the matter until the end of the book, when he accepts the fate for which his great uncle prepared him and realizes his insatiable hunger can only be fed with spiritual nourishment.

“He began to feel that he was only just now meeting himself, as if as long as his uncle had lived, he had been deprived of his own acquaintance. I ain’t denying the old man was a good one, his new friend said, but like you said: you can’t be any poorer than dead. They have to take what they can get. His soul is off this mortal earth now and his body is not going to feel the pinch, of fire or anything else.” 

The introduction of the friend—a literal embodiment of Satan, according to O’Connor—is initially characterized as a part of Tarwater’s personality which until the death of Mason is suppressed. This is consistent with O’Connor’s views on free will in that she believes individuals behave as if multiple conflicting wills are pulling them in separate directions. In this way, the Devil is both literal and figurative—an amalgam of all the skepticism and sacrilegious urges that already exist within Tarwater and beckon him to act. 

“No no no, the stranger said, there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own self-experience. I know that for a fact. It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you.” 

Building on the previous quote, the Devil influences Tarwater by preying on what’s already inside of him—his arrogance, stubbornness, and individualism. These traits are not bestowed on him by some external evil force but are fundamental traits of his personality exhibited in various ways. The quote is also a demonstration of a famous line from Charles Baudelaire: “One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist.”

“Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she was a whore, the stranger said. He was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That’s all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore.”

Becoming a prophet lies at the heart of Tarwater’s struggle and the entire narrative. Yet rarely do the characters really question the substance of prophecies, both Mason’s and those delivered by the prophets of the Bible. So many of the prophecies in the Bible—including those of Jonah who O’Connor frequently references—consist of little more than delivering God’s judgments against the wicked. Given Mason’s status as a woefully imperfect vessel for these proclamations, his status as a self-ordained prophet represents the kind of religious hypocrisy O’Connor frequently alludes to, here and across her body of work.

“You might as well drink all that liquor since you’ve already drunk so much. Once you pass the moderation mark you’ve passed it, and that gyration you feel working down from the top of your brain, he said, that’s the Hand of God laying a blessing on you. He has given you your release.”

This is among the earliest examples of the friend’s tendency to repurpose Biblical language in ways that make a mockery of the pious. Mockery is a remarkably effective tactic when it comes to corrupting Tarwater’s soul, as the boy utilizes the same caustic wit in his interactions with Mason and later Rayber. Moreover, it foreshadows an act of religious mockery, the simultaneous drowning and baptism of Bishop.

“He did not look into the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize the child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle had prepared him for. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable.”

The early revelation that accompanies Tarwater’s first meeting with Bishop reflects the extent to which Tarwater is powerless to avoid the destiny Mason prepares for him. Yet despite this early certainty of his fate, a significant number of days pass before he fulfills Mason’s promise and embraces his fate. Perhaps this is because, for now, Tarwater considers the prophecy “unremarkable.” It isn’t until the act of baptism is married to an act of murder that Tarwater begins to reach a state of true revelation, a reflection of O’Connor’s broader ideas about violence facilitating grace.

“At every turn an almost uncontrollable fury would rise in Rayber at the brand of independence the old man had wrought—not a constructive independence but one that was irrational, backwoods, and ignorant.”

Rayber’s attempts to rehabilitate Tarwater are poisoned from the start for many reasons. Not least of which is the boy’s attitude which inevitably reminds Rayber of Mason and his own trauma surrounding the old man. That Rayber is so quick to feel rage at Tarwater’s natural disposition is one of the earliest pieces of evidence to suggest he has yet to properly deal with the psychological damage passed on to him by Mason and is therefore woefully ill-equipped to heal Tarwater’s wounds. Moreover, the quote is another reflection of Rayber’s intellectual hypocrisy. Rayber displays his own brand of arrogance through secularism, though he would likely call this “constructive independence.”

“An insight came to him that he was not to question until the end. He understood that the boy was held in bondage by his great-uncle, that he suffered a terrible false guilt for burning and not burying him, and he saw that he was engaged in a desperate heroic struggle to free himself from the old man’s ghostly grasp.” 

Only in retrospect can the reader sense just how completely oblivious Rayber is to Tarwater’s inner life. The struggle for Tarwater’s soul isn’t fought between Rayber and Mason’s ghost in some epic battle between religion and secularism. That is Rayber’s own struggle which he merely projects onto Tarwater, doing a great disservice to the boy. No, for Tarwater the fight is between Jesus and the Devil—or himself, depending on the reader’s perspective. 

“He was not deceived that this was a whole or a full life, he only knew that it was the way his life had to be lived if it were going to have any dignity at all. He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”

While Rayber’s behavior doesn’t always make him a very sympathetic character, here he projects a profound sadness that resonates deeply. This quote exposes his lofty ideals about the supremacy of the rational mind for what they truly are: a fear of irrationality. There is a significant distinction between true rationality and a mere antipathy toward irrationality. That’s because the latter condition is one that is still driven by that which is irrational, a reflection of the extent to which his uncle continues to poison Rayber’s mind from beyond the grave.

“That the boy’s corruption was this deep did not surprise him. What unstrung him was the thought that what Tarwater carried into the atrocious temple was his own imprisoned image.”

Tarwater’s arrival is utterly destabilizing for Rayber on two fronts. The first is the degree to which the boy’s backwoods arrogance reminds him of Mason. Tarwater’s shell-shocked religiosity reminds Rayber of himself. Thus, the sight of Tarwater forces Rayber to relive his past and present trauma twofold, triggering memories of abuser and abused alike. Rayber’s impressions of Tarwater also play into O’Connor’s broader themes of duality: A baptism is a drowning, a rape is a revelation, and the abuser is the abused.

“To Rayber she was like one of those birds blinded to make it sing more sweetly. Her voice had the tone of a glass bell. His pity encompassed all exploited children—himself when he was a child, Tarwater exploited by the old man, this child exploited by parents, Bishop exploited by the very fact he was alive.”

This quote speaks to Rayber’s frame of mind by exposing the ways in which his childhood trauma and upbringing causes him to view every child in his orbit through the framework of exploitation in service of the irrational. Even Bishop, whose ailments profit no one and are the result of dispassionate genetic randomness, is viewed by Rayber as a victim of exploitation by a God who delights in the boy’s suffering. Such is the extent to which Rayber projects his own deep antipathy toward religion on everyone around him.

“Rayber turned and they walked away in silence. At any point along the way, he could have put his hand on the shoulder next to his and it would not have been withdrawn, but he made no gesture. His head was churning with old rages.” 

Of all the techniques and tactics Rayber uses to reach Tarwater, the one he never employs is affection. This is in part due to his natural aversion to gestures of love and affection, for he fears they will lead him down a path toward madness. Despite the multitude of ways in which O’Connor emphasizes the inevitability of Tarwater’s destiny, it is reasonable to believe that had Rayber been capable of showing love for his charge, the boy might have avoided his murderous fate. This is supported by Tarwater’s uncharacteristically gentle recognition of Rayber’s generosity when he gives him the bottle opener. If Rayber can connect to Tarwater so profoundly with a cheap gas station trinket, imagine what a hand on the shoulder might accomplish. 

“If you are a prophet, it’s only right you should be treated like one. When Jonah dallied, he was cast three days in a belly of darkness and vomited up in the place of his mission. That was a sign; it wasn’t no sensation.”

Here, the friend continues his mockery of Tarwater’s prophetic ambitions by referencing the Book of Jonah from the Old Testament. Jonah is a particularly instructive allusion for O’Connor’s purposes in that, like Tarwater, he is a reluctant prophet. His plummet into the belly of a whale is punishment by God for failing to deliver His prophecy of the divine wrath set to wreak havoc in the city of Nineveh. Moreover, Jonah’s prophecy is not unlike the one Mason delivers to the sinners in the city, along with the one Tarwater is expected to deliver following the end of the novel.

“’The great dignity of man,’ his uncle said, ‘is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it. It’s enough to be a man.’” 

Throughout most of the book, Rayber defines his philosophy of rationality by what it is not, reflecting that a fear of irrationality is what drives him, rather than a positive embrace of reason. It is a rare moment to see Rayber lay out the parameters of what he believes without relying wholly on expressions of disdain for religion. For once, then, Rayber’s worldview stands on its own as something more than mere defiance of his uncle. In the end, however, he fails to live by his own standards of dignity laid out here, crumpling into panic at the sight of the Powderhead cabin remains and managing to do so little for his fellow man that he cannot even save his own son from drowning. 

“Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr’s limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential. She had had the sense, seeing the child in the door, that if it had known that at that moment all its future advantages were being stolen from it, its expression would not have altered a jot. The face for her had expressed the depth of human perversity, the deadly sin of rejecting defiantly one’s own obvious good.” 

Here, Rayber recalls Bernice’s appalled reaction to baby Tarwater’s eerily blank stare upon watching a man get shot twice before his very eyes. From one perspective, this could be viewed as an argument for why the secular world lacks compassion for the incomprehensible. Yet given Rayber’s tendency to project his own present feelings onto every image and memory he perceives, it is worth questioning his reliability as a narrator of the past. The face in his memory is very much the face of Tarwater today. Moreover, Rayber is habitually unwilling to make room for guilt—or forgiveness—in his strictly rational worldview, and therefore it is quite possible that this memory is a distortion designed to relieve himself of the responsibility for never coming back to Powderhead to retrieve Tarwater. 

“He had known by that time that his own stability depended on the little boy’s presence. He could control his terrifying love as long as it had its focus in Bishop, but if anything happened to the child, he would have to face it in itself. Then the whole world would become his idiot child.”

Rayber’s feelings toward Bishop take on a more complicated cast with this quote. Prior to this point in the narrative, Rayber goes to great lengths to check the degree to which he expresses his love for Bishop, for fear of falling into the pit of irrational behavior he so fears. Here, however, he acknowledges Bishop as a convenient receptacle for his love that keeps it from spilling over into the wide world. Later, this lends the moment when Rayber learns of Bishop’s death a measure of ambiguity. When he feels no grief over the loss of his son, it may suggest that Rayber was never capable of love in the first place. Alternatively, it could signal to the man that his use of Bishop as a fortress to keep irrational thoughts at bay was only ever an illusion.

“It fell in us both alike. The difference is that I know it’s in me and I keep it under control. I weed it out but you’re too blind to know it’s in you. You don’t even know what makes you do the things you do.”

In a moment of surprising insight, Rayber diagnoses Tarwater’s broader problem perfectly: The boy lacks awareness of the forces driving him toward his destiny, whether it’s family trauma, inherited mental illness, or the Devil. It is for this reason that despite Tarwater’s ability to act and supposedly take control of his life, those actions do little to chart a new path forward for the boy.

“I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.” 

Another dichotomy frequently explored by O’Connor is action versus inaction. Tarwater prides himself on his ability to assert his will—against Rayber, against the memory of Mason, and against the voice in his head. Yet because he lacks understanding of the forces guiding these actions, he is no less a slave to destiny than Rayber, who is paralyzed with inaction. As seen elsewhere in the book, two supposed dichotomies lead to the same result: a path to ruin.

“He stood waiting for the raging pain, the intolerable hurt that was his due, to begin, so that he could ignore it, but he continued to feel nothing. He stood light-headed at the window and it was not until he realized there would be no pain that he collapsed.” 

The collapse detailed here after Rayber hears Bishop die is open to multiple interpretations. It could be a collapse of relief; after all, Rayber attempted to drown Bishop in the past. Or it could be relief over a lack of feeling, a sign that Rayber has finally conquered his irrationality. Yet both of these readings may be too simple. Given that Rayber’s cult of rationality has always been something of a smokescreen for more deeply-seated issues, it is possible that at this moment Rayber is finally struck by the despair and emptiness of the emotionally-cloistered life he has built for himself.

“There are them that act and them that can’t, and them that are hungry and them that ain’t. That’s all. I can act. And I ain’t hungry.” 

In the wake of Bishop’s murder, Tarwater is seen trying to reassert what are perhaps the only two constants in his personality: his ability to act and his rejection of the bread of life. The desperation these ramblings take on seem to represent a last-ditch effort to resist his destiny, even as he grows ever closer to an acknowledgement of his need for spiritual nourishment. This quote is also notable in that in represents one of the few moments when Tarwater—who is forced to talk to keep the trucker awake—vocalizes his thoughts in a way that is entirely unguarded

“Make haste, he said. Time is like money and money is like blood and time turns blood to dust.”

This quote is spoken to Tarwater by the friend in the moments before Bishop’s drowning. It is a callback to a line from the first chapter which also serves as the title of the short story on which the book is based: “You can’t be any poorer than dead.” This idea of life as a currency which is useless once it’s spent is a persistent concept in the friend’s dialogue. 

“It was as no boy that he returned. He returned tried in the fire of his refusal, with all the old man’s fancies burnt out of him, with all the old man’s madness smothered for good, so that there was never any chance it would break out in him. He had saved himself forever from the fate he had envisioned when, standing in the schoolteacher’s hall and looking into the eyes of the dim-witted child, he had seen himself trudging off into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, lost forever to his own inclinations.” 

Here, fire takes on yet another cast, operating as a motif for Tarwater’s refusal to accept his destiny. It is different from the fire that burns into Mason’s brain and convinces him of his status as a prophet. That fire, however, burns a person clean, whereas the fire of refusal—as Rayber learns—represents not a cleansing but a hardening of one’s outer shell that must be constantly fortified to keep mental illness at bay. It is thus unsurprising that shortly after Tarwater is emotionally broken by the sexual assault incident, he embraces the cleansing fire of the Lord rather than the fire of refusal.

“The clearing was burned free of all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.”

At this point, Tarwater still holds onto the belief that his early symbolic act of burning the cabin with Mason’s dead body inside is sufficient to cleanse him of the trauma of his upbringing. He takes pride in this transgression, the one Rayber would never give him credit for, nor fully acknowledge. For that reason, Tarwater’s imminent discovery of the burial mound and wooden cross erected by Buford will shatter his world, reminding him that his unwilling covenant with his great uncle can never truly be broken.