The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

Under no condition is the young Tarwater to have his great uncle cremated, as a casket burial is believed to be necessary for him to enjoy the fullness of the Resurrection. First, the boy must ensure that when his great uncle dies, he is buried in a casket in a ten foot deep grave. The boy was told that he too was a prophet of God and was given two tasks by his great uncle. The young Tarwater was then raised by his great uncle. When Rayber attempted to recover the child from the great uncle’s backwoods cabin, the great uncle shot at him, injuring his ear and leaving him permanently hearing-impaired. Rayber viewed baptism, which he too had undergone at the hands of his uncle, as a poisoned chalice meant to reinforce the illness of religiosity and draw children away from knowledge and rational behaviour. The great uncle, Mason Tarwater, kidnapped the infant Tarwater from the home of the schoolteacher uncle, George Rayber, and had the boy baptised, against Rayber’s will. From this point onward, the infant Tarwater became the object of a tug-of-war between his great uncle–a fanatical self-styled Christian prophet who lived in the backwoods after being released from an asylum–and his uncle, a secularist schoolteacher from the city, who embraced a quintessentially Modernist understanding of how to improve humankind’s lot here on Earth. His mother died in the accident and his father, burdened by guilt, committed suicide shortly thereafter.

Tarwater was born out of wedlock, at the site of a fatal car crash. The book centres on the young Francis Marion Tarwater, a teenager in this novel.

The other such sign is the sacramental worldview that frames this novel - everything created, every material object, has some special significance, serving as an instrument of revelation and transcending the mere physical. O’Connor sets the tone of her story with a Scripture verse, Matthew 11:12, taken specifically from the Douay-Rheims translation, which reads: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” In a book that drips of the backwoods Fundamentalist Christian culture of the American south, the use of the Douay-Rheims Bible is one reminder of O’Connor’s Catholicism. The narrative is uncomfortable, the rich imagery captivating and at times suffocating it’s as if every forest, highway, sky and human interaction is steeped in a mystery that the mind can never fully understand. (The illustration at the top of this page is the cover of the original edition.)Įvery page of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel The Violent Bear It Away is a haunting read. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, (Original edition: 1960), 256 pgs.

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor