The Violent Bear It Away

A schoolteacher living in the city, Rayber is Tarwater’s uncle who invites the boy into his home following the death of Mason to save him from the old man’s fanatical religious influence. When he was seven-years-old, Rayber was kidnapped by Mason and for four days indoctrinated in the ways of the Lord. This created in Rayber an obsession with Jesus that was only excised when he renounced Christianity altogether and threw himself into a strict secular existence. Moreover, Rayber is so frightened of losing his mind like Mason that he willfully denies himself any feelings of love or passion, even those toward his intellectually-disabled son, Bishop. O’Connor characterizes this attitude: “[Rayber] 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” (115).

Rayber seems to be driven less by genuine compassion for Tarwater and more by a pathological need to reverse the psychological damage Mason caused to himself as a child. As a result, his tactics for “curing” Tarwater are fundamentally flawed, given his own failure to overcome the trauma associated with Mason. Moreover, Rayber’s habitual inability to act on his impulses causes Tarwater to feel great contempt for the schoolteacher, poisoning any efforts toward rehabilitation.

Neither a hero nor a villain, Rayber is nevertheless a tragic figure in that he represents the pitfalls of extreme secularism that precludes spirituality or grace of any kind. Having arrived at this position due to his uncle’s actions, Rayber is as much a slave to Mason’s influence as Tarwater and thus hurtles toward an ignoble destiny with the same sense of inevitability. After Tarwater kills Bishop, Rayber is disturbed less by the death and more by his inability to feel anything about it. 

A self-proclaimed prophet and Christian zealot, Mason is Tarwater’s great uncle and Rayber’s uncle. Although he dies at the age of 84 at the start of the book, his presence hangs heavily over the entire narrative and the lives of its principal characters. His fanaticism—which may be the result of mental illness—manifests at an early age through dire apocalyptic proclamations. When his prophecies fail to come about, a finger made of fire “touched him and the destruction he had been waiting for had fallen in his own brain and his own body. His own blood had been burned dry and not the blood of the world” (5).

The two promises Mason extracts from Tarwater before his death—to give him a Christian burial and to baptize Bishop—set into motion the book’s larger philosophical conflict. After failing to honor the first promise, Tarwater becomes fixated on the second, despite knowing that its fulfillment will likely lead to his own descent into madness as he becomes a raving prophet like Mason.

In keeping with O’Connor’s tendency to paint characters as philosophical or cultural extremes, Mason’s unfettered religious zealotry is presented in stark contrast to Rayber’s strict secularism. Through this, O’Connor challenges her more religious-minded readers by highlighting the character’s arrogance and tendency toward violence, making him a questionable representative of Christian piety. This is done either despite or because of O’Connor’s deep Catholic faith; she has little patience for religious hypocrisy. 

The friend is a voice that emerges in Tarwater’s head shortly after Mason’s death. At first, the friend is framed as the skeptical part of Tarwater’s personality, one that questions Mason’s teachings and only emerges following the old man’s death: “[Tarwater] 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” (35). Yet as the narrative progresses, it becomes clearer that the friend is a manifestation of Satan, a fact confirmed by O’Connor in a letter to author Elizabeth Fenwick Way. Through wit, persuasion, and clever capitalization on Tarwater’s insecurities, the friend manages to convince the boy to drown Bishop while simultaneously baptizing him, causing both the death of an innocent and the desecration of a holy rite. According to O’Connor, the same Satanic presence that constitutes the voice emerges later in the personified form of the rapist. It is an open question as to whether the friend’s actions forestall Tarwater’s embrace of his destiny as a prophet or accelerate it.