The Violent Bear It Away Essays

Martin shows how Tarwater’s prophetic calling is transformed by his exposure to Bishop, the idiot child, who represents the messianic kingdom of heaven.

Ciuba, who explores the pervasiveness of forsaken children in O’Connor’s fiction, including .

He connects this theme with the Fall and the soul’s resulting orphan state, but he also shows that at the end of the novel the orphan becomes a child of God.

Focusing on three characteristics of reason, will, and love—Huelin shows how three of the novel’s major characters embody those qualities, even if they also represent perversion of those qualities. Travis Kroeker presents a strong argument linking the novel with the apocalyptic vision of John, the prophet, and tying this vision closely to the Eucharist and baptism.

Working not only with the title of the novel but also with the epigraph and what he feels is the pervasiveness of the influence of the Gospel of Matthew on the work, Karl E.

” The answer is complex, but it is directly connected to the scandal of the cross and its attendant violence.

The authors of this collection of essays start from that point of understanding and develop angles of vision that peel open a novel permeated with both suffering and grace.

Rayber, Tarwater's uncle, a schoolteacher, had, himself, received the old man's indelible mark but he had repudiated his fate and married a woman from the Department of Welfare, twice his age. When Tarwater met the schoolteacher's dim and ancient idiot.

When Tarwater met the schoolteacher's dim and ancient idiot child, Bishop, he knew that he was expected to baptize him -- to carry on his great uncle's mission.

Jason Peters emphasizes the importance in O’Connor’s work of the particular rather than the general, the concrete rather than the abstract, and the person of Jesus rather than an abstract idea of God.

In this novel, Rayber is drawn to the abstract, and Peters demonstrates how abstraction violently separates individuals from each other and from themselves.