Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood is in a collection of short stories: the other 2 are: The Violent Bear It Away and Everything That Arises Must Converge.

Wise Blood runs 120 pages, and each page was tough for me. Let me go back to the beginning of the WB experience. There is a foreword by Sally Fitzgerald, basically giving O'Connors background and then an analysis of each story evolution. It's runs some 34 pages and after about 25 I went straight to the actual story because I only have the one version, not the many versions Fitzgerald mentions and frankly it means nothing to me until after I read the story.

It took me 3 days to read it. THe story centers around Hazel Motes who runs from his religion but in turn actually turns him deeper into religion. There is a small cast of characters, each one as creepy as the previous. I didn't like the characters, didn't like the tone. As BABoR said in an earlier post, it'll leave you depressed.

Ah yeah. The writing reminded me of Rand, the period is similar, the setting reminded me of Capote, the characters reminded me of Steinbecks. But I can see where O'Connor is a writers writer not the publics writer. Rand always has some goodness, some grandiosity to her descriptions, her characters, even if they are basically seen as mean or evil. Capote gives one a sense of sympathy to each of his characters, a pathos that the everyman can see. Steinbeck's characters have more depth to them (as I see them) because there are differences in how the characters analyse and react to their circumstances.

All of her characters seem to be retarded. One could maintain well, this is the south and none of these people are all that educated but I'm of the mind even the uneducated are smart, eduction isn't anything without some deductive reasonsing. All the characters are base, crass and oblivious to anything but some unnamed psychological muck. I suppose living in this age one looks for reasons why people behave in certain ways and nobody in this book reasons well enough to understand why they do/say the things they do. I felt all the characters were despicable. I got no joy, no leap of resolution by any action of any character. Ok, maybe one minor character who told his young (underage) daughter that he was going to leave and he did. It was practically the only action that happened because he stated he was going to do something. Everything else was just done without reason given even in hints to the reader.

I think this is more of a writers story in that there is no satisfaction for the reader. The main characters had no satisfaction so why should the reader? The characters were well drawn but without understand the reasoning behind the characters it was if they were drawn to practice the worst in a character. Each character is a tragedy in toto.

I went back to read the foreword, all of it. I found it odd because Fitzgerald mentioned numerous times that O'Conner was a comic writer. Ah, I never got one iota of comic, comic antics, or lightness that one usually relates to a comic writer. Unless what she means is tragedy is comedy, then it's a real kneeslapper. I was lost in understanding the symbolism, my own fault I'm sure as I know the Bible ok but was not, in the reading of the book able to correlate Hazel Motes actions to any specific persons or situations from the Bible.

It was worth the read, just so I don't take for granted the skill in which writers today hone characters with more depth, more factors to understand behavior in characters. It teaches me that I am not comfortable with characters no matter where they are set that seem stupid to me. I mean it, the characters all seemed to have IQ's of barely functional levels.

I'm going to end up reading the other stories, would like to see how she evolves over time. Maybe I'll like the other stories. Maybe I'll see a bit of comic in her writing. Maybe I feel just as tortured. I don't know.