Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Wise Blood: A Novel
Book Review: Nothing but the blood
Summary: 4 Stars
Flannery O'Connor was a gifted writer, able to convey the hidden pulses inherent in human life, bringing to the forefront the controversies that exist in the battle between secularism and Christianity. "Wise Blood" is a difficult novel to read for several reasons; it is a disjointed mishmash of stories that O'Connor expanded upon, with characters who appear and disappear at random. But the main difficulty is its subject matter - at its core is Hazel Motes, an angry young man who has been discharged from the Army, who is desperately trying to escape the hold that Jesus has on him. It is a raw and sometimes scathing satirical look at society and the role that religion plays in our everyday lives.
The story begins with Hazel Motes taking a train to the city of Taulkinham, where his attention is immediately captured by a blind preacher and his daughter. Hazel cannot get the pair out of his mind and follows them to their boarding house, taking a room so that he can be close to them. Hazel is insistent that he does not need religion, and to prove his point sets up his own church - the Church Without Christ - with a membership of one. Preaching of the "new jesus" who will come, Hazel increasingly finds himself in situations he doesn't want to be in. The visions he has for his life are failing to come to fruition until he takes a drastic, irreversible step to cement his strangling faith.
O'Connor's creations are not likeable characters - they are fierce, ugly people who reflect the darkest sides of humanity. The disjointed structure makes for a frustrating read at times - sometimes too much happens, sometimes nothing seems to happen. When the end finally comes, it comes too quickly and out of the perspective of the main characters. While I am a huge fan of O'Connor's works, her brilliance shines brighter in her short stories.
Book Review: One of the Best!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This was the first novel of Ms. O'Connor's I read. I had read her short stories and loved them. Let me say this; I finished reading this book and IMMEDIATELY flipped to the beginning and read it again. It is AMAZING. So dark and true and humorous and everything good literature should be.Book Review: The Dark Comedy of Religion
Summary: 4 Stars
One of only two novels by Flannery O'Connor, who died at the tender age of 39 from lupus, Wise Blood tells the story of Hazel Motes, a 22 year old veteran turned street preacher. Hazel makes it his mission, after encountering a blind preacher named Asa Hawks, to preach about a church of his own inventing: The Church of God Without Christ. Along the way he meets Enoch Emery and Sabbath Lily. Enoch is an 18 year old who vies for attention and companionship from Hazel. Sabbath Lily Hawks, the daughter of Asa Hawks, seduces Hazel, and similarly wants his attention. Despite his many sins committed throughout the novel, Hazel is consistently reminded of God's presence and he struggles with accepting the condemning words he speaks.
O'Connor calls Wise Blood a "comic novel" and there are many instances of comedy throughout the novel. It is typical of O'Connor's fiction in the sense that she peoples it with unforgettable characters with unique tendencies and physical abnormalities, some of which are actually quite humorous. There is a distinct sense of tragic irony, also a hallmark of O'Connor, in the character of Hazel Motes. His suffering is quite justifiable, and he is rather unlikable as a character, but we can sympathize with him in many instances of misfortune. Enoch too is a tragic character because he is sadly neglected by Hazel, even though he cries out for attention and especially acceptance, something Enoch has never really had.
Many issues are also addressed in Wise Blood that are typical of Southern Literature of the 1950s, specifically racism, police brutality and the overzealous religiosity of the South.
A recurring motif in the novel is blindness. Hazel Motes' own name suggests blindness, itself being a Biblical reference: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." (Matthew 7:5, KJV). No less than two characters in the novel suffer blindness by their own hands and Hazel himself seems to wander around blindly preaching his own gospel, perhaps only because his life lacks definition after returning from the war. So too are many of the characters blindsided by unforeseen circumstances that ruin their lives.
In Wise Blood, O'Connor has drafted a modern Southern Gothic parable about faith and spiritual malaise. The novel is rich with characterization and deep symbolisms. Though it is a Christian novel, O'Connor herself being Roman Catholic, this is an enigmatic read for Christians and non-Christians alike.
Book Review: The Resurrection According to Petronius
Summary: 5 Stars
Wise Blood
Early in `Wise Blood', the boy Hazel Motes goes with his father to a cheap country carnival and sneaks into the nudey tent. He's revolted and runs away. I can share his revulsion; entering Flannery O'Connor's fiction is like peeking into a sleazy freak show. If I got on a bus full of O'Connor's characters, I'd hop off at the next stop. If I found myself sharing heaven with Hazel Motes, I'd ask for a transfer. Hieronymus Bosch never painted an uglier crew of imps in his altarpieces of the Last Judgment. What's the point of all this talk about redemption? If this book portrays the reality of O'Connor's world, she was already in H*ll. If there is to be a religious exegesis of this novel, it will have to be in the language of Zoroaster, of the uneradicable strain of Gnosticism in Christianity. The J*sus that Hazel Motes seeks to `get rid of' is more the Malefactor-Creator of the Gnostic scriptures than the Redeemer of Catholicism, and if that's so, then Hazel is the True Prophet of his Church Without Christ and his self-destruction is sanctified.
Wise Blood is the sort of book that, when you've read ten pages you begin to ask `what's all this,' a question you keep asking until the last page, when you ask `what the hey was that about?' Well, dear friends, I like books that make me ask what they were about. In fact, they're the only kind I like.
With this text, we have two choices: to accept that Wise Blood is about precisely what its author thought it was about, or to assume that the author has no better claim on the meaning of her words than anyone else. Obviously the second choice - fashionable post-modernism - is more fun.
O'Connor chose sides in her one-page preface to the second edition, ten years after the first publication in 1952. She wrote: "It is a comic novel about a Christian maulgré lui." Moi, I find that word `comic' problematic. Despite scene after scene of absurdity, I swear I never laughed once while reading Wise Blood, so I assume that `comic' doesn't mean `funny'. A classical sense of `comedy' would require a happy resolution, and that's hardly what the book delivers. If `comic' means satirical, the term would fit, but to call this a "comic novel" has to be either snarky sarcasm or else a dark stain of sado-masochism in O'Connor's worldview. I'm pretty certain that O'Connor never encountered LSD or peyote -- if she had, it would explain much -- but her imagination came close to the ergot-poisoned fantasies of late Medieval witchcraft trials. I can think of one even better precendent for the sheer nastiness of Wise Blood -- The Satyricon of Petronius, the classic expression of PAGAN moral ambiguity.
Honestly, while I regard this book as a loathsome treasure, I prefer Flannery O'Connor's short stories - those I've read - from the volume "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Compression helps. Some of her best stories wring as much out of me in 15 pages as Wise Blood in 180. It's not an experience you'd want often, to ride an elevator down to H*ll with Hazel Motes, Enoch Emory, Asa Hawks, and Lily Sabbath, the grotesque cast of this Southern Gothic horror story.
Book Review: Utterly confusing
Summary: 1 Stars
This book was chosen for my monthly book club and out of 10 women, not a single one of us enjoyed reading it. Most of us were confused by the story because a lot of it didn't even make sense. There was no real flow to the story and it was a struggle just to make it to the end. The characters were all pretty nasty people and the book definitely is not one to read if you want to be put in a good mood. I would not recommend this to anyone.