The Violent Bear It Away Reading Order

The Violent Bear It Away (1960) by Flannery O'Connor is her second and final novel — the story of fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater and his attempted escape from the prophetic identity his great-uncle Mason Tarwater has prepared for him. Old Tarwater, a self-proclaimed prophet who has lived for years in the Tennessee woods, dies before completing his final prophetic task: the baptism of his nephew Rayber's mentally disabled son Bishop. Young Tarwater goes to the city to live with the schoolteacher Rayber (his uncle), who is a rationalist determinist and sees young Tarwater's prophetic calling as mere conditioning from the old man. The novel moves toward its terrible climax: young Tarwater, unable to escape the call, drowns Bishop while simultaneously baptizing him — and then, fleeing into the woods, is raped and set on fire in his sleep, after which he walks back toward the city to fulfill the prophetic task that has been driving the novel. O'Connor's theological vision here is at its most uncompromising: the title comes from Matthew 11:12 ('the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent bear it away'), and the violence of the novel — the drowning-baptism, the rape, the burning — is the form in which grace arrives in a world that has rejected all conventional religious categories. Young Tarwater cannot choose not to be a prophet; the rational Rayber cannot choose to remain rational in the face of his violent love for Bishop. Free will and divine compulsion are the novel's simultaneous subjects.