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Summary: The virus of religious fanaticism
Review: It was predicted by Francis Tarwater's great-uncle that young Tarwater would become a prophet and would baptize the son of the great-uncle's other nephew, Rayber. Young Tarwater is orphaned in a car crash and is raised by his great-uncle, a very disturbed Tennesee backwoods religious fanatic. At the great-uncle's death, young Tarwater comes to live with Rayber apparently for the sole purpose of carrying out his mission to baptize Rayber's young, supposedly mentally defective child. Rayber, a school teacher with Hamlet-like indecisiveness, is, nevertheless, adamantly opposed to his nephew's scheme. He instead wants young Tarwater educated and to overcome his ignorant notions. Even though young Tarwater swears that he wants no part of his great-uncle's prophesies, he is nevertheless compelled to carry out his destiny. Interestingly, Rayber suffers from may of the same neurotic compulsions of his nephew, but struggles to hold them in check. Young Tarwater and a very emotionally flawed Rayber are virtually at war for the young child's soul. Ms. O'Connor freely uses metaphors and symbolism to draw her characters and to embellish her story. She particularly utilizes the elements of nature throughtout this novel: fire, water, earth, air, and often refers to young Tarwater's great "hunger," another elemental force that he cannot seem to satiate. _The Violent Bear It Away_ is very well-written and very frightening in its intensity. Some very disturbing (maybe too disturbing) things occur in this book. It is made perfectly clear that once the virus of religious righteousness infects somebody, there is nothing that person would not do to fulfill his crusade, even if it means trampling on the rights of the innocent.
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Summary: A Far-fetched Tale
Review: Many of the themes in this book were just to difficult for me to focus on without stepping back to question whether anything like this could really happen....at least in this way. For instance, the lack of emphasis on the drowing death of Bishop is just hard to understand. What about Tarwater's moral accountability for Bishop's death?? Tarwater was also a heavy drinker....which is not very likely in the time eriod this is writen, especially for his age. It was a good moral message, but i think ia little overdone.
Rating:
Summary: A Far-fetched Tale
Review: Many of the themes in this book were just to difficult for me to focus on without stepping back to question whether anything like this could really happen....at least in this way. For instance, the lack of emphasis on the drowing death of Bishop is just hard to understand. What about Tarwater's moral accountability for Bishop's death?? Tarwater was also a heavy drinker....which is not very likely in the time eriod this is writen, especially for his age. It was a good moral message, but i think ia little overdone.
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Summary: Grotesquerie and Fanaticism -- perfect O'Connor
Review: O'Connor characters are either complacent believers or condescending rationalists, and she takes great bloody fun in showing them up. This book is a runaway train about the clash of human pride, family dysfunction, religious fanaticism, and destiny, haunted as in all O'Connor by her bloody Christ whom men try not to believe in but still can never escape. Terrific and disturbing.
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Summary: Grotesque?
Review: O'Connor defended the grotesque element in her fiction this way: "The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. . . . you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." O'Connor is certainly a "novelist with Christian concerns." Some of her early reviewers misread her as satirizing her protagonists, in the manner of Erskine Caldwell's THE JOURNEYMAN. Nothing could be further from her intention. In THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY (VBIA), for example, she says that she if 100% on Mason Tarwater's side; that is, on the side of a violent old man, a self-styled backwoods prophet, who had been locked up four years in a mental institution. Francis Tarwater's urban uncle Rayber sometimes experiences an "unhealthy" surge of absolute love, and with it, "a rush of longing to have to have the old man's [Mason's] eyes-insane, fish-colored, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured-turned on him once again." O' Connor sees Mason as a true prophet, in the line the equally mad OT prophets-Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, etc. And she shares his insane vision of "a world transfigured"; ie, the Kingdom of God. Jesus himself may not have been a comfortable person to be around. An interesting aspect of O'Connor's fiction is that she was a devout Catholic, yet Catholicism and Catholics play only a very small part in her fiction-and none at all in VBIA. She wrote about what she knew about, which was Southern evangelism. Indeed, in VBIA, no church is featured, and only once do we see Tarwater happening into a store-front church. Other than this, there is no churchgoing. The Christianity of her characters is a difficult, lonely one. The psychological structure and center of VBIA, like that of WISE BLOOD and many of the stories, is the protagonist's resistance to vocation. Perhaps O'Connor would agree with Heraclitus that "character is fate," that is, that our true vocation is programmed deep within us. Tarwater expressed this in the trope "seeds dropped in the blood." The mark of one's true vocation seems to be the calling we fight hardest against. Rayber wages a successful fight against his vocation; Tarwater, an unsuccessful one. The thematic center of the novel, as I see it, is the passage dealing with Rayber and divine love: "For the most part Rayber lived with him [his retarded son Bishop] without being painfully aware of his presence but the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity. It was only a touch of the curse that lay in his blood. "His normal way of looking at Bishop was as an X signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God, but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of an equation that required no further solution--except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. . . . "He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. He had seen it transform in cases where nothing else had worked, such as with his poor sister. None of this had the least bearing on his situation. The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind that could be used for the child's improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all-demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. . . ." For O'Connor, God's love is "imperious and all-demanding," and "exists only to be itself."
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Summary: O'Connor twists another story into a lesson in life.
Review: O'Connor writes a beautifully twisted and black novel that leaves one cringing at her lesson. Through amazing imagery and symbolism, she lands her hit while still remaining conspicuously subtle. The characters play off of each other perfectly, conveying the message without actually CONVEYING the message--the key to great writing!
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Summary: i haven't seen it all yet?
Review: sorry but i havn't seen this boo
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Summary: Classic Southern Gothic
Review: The Violent Bear it Away is a disturbing example of the unique gothic tradition of America's Southern writers. The story centers around young Francis Tarwater, nephew of a self-styled/self-proclaimed prophet, Mason Tarwater. Mason's purpose for living is to prepare Francis for his own prophetic ministry. However, Francis has a very different idea of what a prophetic ministry should be like. Hence, the conflict of the story is contained in Francis's trying to divest himself of his uncle's influence, an attempt that the story interprets as rebellion, which the Bible states is as witchcraft. Thus, the reader can expect young Tarwater to pay an awful price for his rebellion
Like almost all of O'Connor's stories, The Violent Bear it Away is essentially a tale of how the supernatural intrudes and imposes its will on the lives of ordinary people. The story is further given a divine theme by frequent symbolic elements, such as Francis's hat being something like a halo, and another child in the story serving as either an angelic or Christ-figure. The story even opens with an African-Amerian man erecting a cross at a grave, a scene reminiscent of the Biblical Simon of Cyrene being pressed into carrying the cross of Jesus on the way to Golgotha. Occasionally, the supernatural is not fully explained by the story, and there are some unanswered questions when the story ends, the main question concerning the reality of young Tarwater's mysterious, almost Svengalli-like friend.
The narrative structure of the story is very interesting, as O'Connor allows each character to give his own accounts and assessments of the same events, a technique that is somewhat similar to that used by William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying and Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter.
As O'Connor's second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away represents the maturation of her technique. The narration resembles that of her first novel, Wise Blood, but shows the refinement wrought by the several years of thought between the two works. The story is easy to follow despite its several twists and its couple of very disturbing scenes.
Although not my favorite work by Flannery O'Connor (her short stories are much better), The Violent Bear it Away is an essential read for anyone wanting to understand Southern Literature in general and the Southern Gothic tradition in particular. And even if the reader isn't interested in such literary specialties, The Violent Bear it Away is a good enough story to stand on its own.
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Summary: Finest work
Review: This book is probably O'Connor's finest work of fiction. The story itself is much stronger than the more highly acclaimed Wise Blood, as are its characters. I find it interesting that one reviewer referred to disliking the grotesque characters, while admiring O'Connor's use of symbolism and metaphor. One who has read O'Connor knows that there are few characters in the author's opus that could not be classified as grotesque. As far as her use of symbolism, one must certainly recognize that O'Connor's characters were the most obvious manifestations of her symbolism and metaphor. As she herself said, when drawing for a child, one makes the figure overly-clear. Also, while this book, might seem to tread between rational humanism and religion, the end finds O'Connor squarely on the side of the seemingly tyrannical, certainly unbalanced uncle. The story is funny, full of observation and commentary, and endowed with the wisdom of one who has seen the world and is on their way out, as O'Connor was by the time the Violent Bear it Away was written. In short, no library is complete without this work-the paramount achievement of one of the century's greatest authors.
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Summary: Excellent writing....
Review: This is a quality book. If you are debating on whether or not to buy it -- take the chance, buy it. The ending is great. Not as commonly known as F.O'Cs other works, but well worth the shipping price! *S*
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