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Wa-a-ait a second... Dec 28, 2004 (33 of 34 found this helpful)
I think it's important to correct a common misperception that's been cropping up in the reviews here. I can understand how someone might come to the conclusion that The Violent Bear it Away is an exposure of, or an attack on, religious fanaticism, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that this was not the author's intention. Flannery O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic, and nearly all of her stories (check out especially A Good Man is Hard to Find) carry a very extreme and uncompromising religious message. Everything connected with her - the other stories, her personal correspondence, and the text of Violent itself - suggest that it was meant as, crudely stated, an endorsement of fanaticism; or more accurately, a spiritual call to arms, and an attack of meek secularism. This doesn't mean that the book is only for religious people. Someone reading it from an antifanatic standpoint might well benefit, if only by discovering in the person of the author herself an example of the fanaticism they find so distasteful. A religious reader, though, should not be frightened away by all these reviews suggesting that The Violent is a plea for religious moderation. O'Connor's vision, above all, was radical and unconventional, and for either a religious, an agnostic or an antireligious reader, it presents something to think about.
As for the book itself, I only give it four stars because I think O'Connor's short stories are a better exploration of her themes. In the long form, instead of presenting a more nuanced view of the world, there is only room for more brutality and meanness; which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, but which isn't a good thing either. I would reccommend either of O'Connor's short story collections before The Violent, but for a fan of her work, The Violent is indispensable.
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Finest work Jun 15, 2000 (23 of 24 found this helpful)
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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Uncontrollable spirits, orphans, Jul 25, 2005 (12 of 12 found this helpful)
The Violent Bear It Away was O'Connor's second and last novel. Gripping and sickening, it tells the story of a strong-willed, self-declared prophet in a Georgia backwater, his rationalist nephew struggling to free himself from the influence of his uncle's misguided zeal, and his reluctant successor grandnephew, all of them working out their destiny frenetically and enthusiastically, with terrifying consequences.
The world of this novel is a place where familial relations exist, but appear as if in funhouse mirror images. The odd circumstance is that apparently almost everyone is someone's uncle. Prophet Mason Tarwater is schoolteacher Rayber's uncle. Rayber is, in turn the uncle of prophet-in-training Francis Tarwater, who has lived all his life with his great uncle Mason. These avuncular relationships approximate and seem to replace the paternal ones, but inadequately. And mothers qua mothers are absent entirely: women are only referred to in conversation, never seen in the actual novel, and the characters can only see the women who are mothers as whores or as confused women on a voyage of self-discovery. "Mother" is not in our characters' lexicon.
Reflecting this, the actions of the Tarwaters reveal a distorted and truncated trinitarianism, in which Father and Son are subsumed into the Spirit and vanish, leaving blind enthusiasm outside of relationship and fellow feeling. Similarly, Rayber is possessed of an impersonal drive to rational goodness, to the betterment of his fellow man. His uncle rejects him because he insists on holding all things and persons in the world in abstract judgment within his mind; both elder and younger Tarwaters refuse to let Rayber place them "inside his head," to reduce them from acting subjects to intellectual objects. Rayber paradoxically struggles to deny his natural affections for his retarded son Bishop. He seems capable of loving only in the abstract, indeed, to be following some rationalist maxim to stamp out the irrational wellsprings of love for his insufficiently gifted son.
It's powerful work. The first two parts in particular are tight and arresting leading to a tragic climax. The third part is somewhat cryptic. I have no idea how O'Connor intends us to take Francis Tarwater's resolution at the end of the novel, but that's a strength. This is a novel to be read again.
John Huston created a movie adaptation of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, which I saw many years ago. Of directors working today, someone like Robert Duvall seems well-suited temperamentally and artistically for realizing O'Connor's terrifying and befuddling visions. However it happens, Flannery O'Connor's work deserves to be brought to life for another generation of viewers and readers.
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The Southern Gothic struggle between religious belief and secular knowledge Dec 4, 2005 (20 of 23 found this helpful)
O'Connor second and last novel is a sometimes comic yet ultimately tragic novel about a young Southern boy's spiritual development. Francis Tarwater, who is fourteen years old, has been sheltered from society in the Alabama boondocks by his great-uncle, Old Tarwater, who is grooming the boy to be a somewhat reluctant prophet, espousing a unique hybrid of countrified Christianity.
The novel's plot is simultaneously bizarre in event and puzzling in intent, and it is heavy with Old Testament imagery. At the opening of the novel, Old Tarwater has died, leaving Francis with the task of burying him. The boy abandons his assignment and flees to the city, searching for an atheistic uncle, George Rayber, who had spurned Old Tarwater's lessons decades earlier. During his life, Old Tarwater had been obsessed with need to baptize Bishop's mentally handicapped son, and Francis wavers between the need to complete his great-uncle's mission and his reluctance to follow in the old man's footsteps.
The bulk of the story, however, concerns the struggle between Francis and his uncle George--between metaphysical belief and secular knowledge. George is a parody of the arrogance of modern thinking; he is wedded to the belief that humans are shaped by their environment and by the atoms of which they are composed. Francis, on the other hand, is a portrait of the mysterious and even violent nature of religious passion.
Scholars and a legion of the author's fans have pointed out (correctly) that O'Connor did not mean Francis's character to be a satirical depiction of religious fanaticism. Yet the many critics and students who have mistaken both Francis and Old Tarwater as caricatures underscore the novel's greatest weakness; the social context has run away from the author. Even in 1960, when the novel was published, the two "hicks" seemed vaguely preposterous and dangerously harebrained to many reviewers (much to O'Connor's chagrin), and today's readers have an even more difficult time seeing these two-would be prophets as anything more than backwoods stereotypes.
Yet this tension between the author's intentions and the reader's reception hardly diminishes the power of O'Connor's vision; if anything, its accidental parody of fundamentalism offsets her deliberate (and undeniably unfair) satire of secularism. As in her other work, O'Connor is exploring the difficulty of seeking (and of finding) spiritual deliverance, especially since the path to salvation often leads the seeker away from the individuality of his or her own identity. The struggle that O'Connor portrays--between religion and secularism--is surely as present and relevant today as it is was fifty years ago.
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Classic Southern Gothic Nov 8, 2001 (10 of 10 found this helpful)
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.