Book Review: The Violent Bear It Away

Title: The Violent Bear It Away

Author: Flannery O’Connor

Date: 1960, 1983

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1960), Signet (1983)

ISBN: none

Length: 148 pages (compressed paperback)

Quote: “Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave.”

By 1960 events like the plot of The Violent Bear It Away would have become local legends: Once, long ago, before we had a school or a cemetery, there was a family who suffered from episodes of violent rage, and this was what became of the last of that line...

The title of this novel is taken from a Bible verse. “It” here refers to what belongs to “the kingdom of heaven” in this lifetime. Tarwater and his sick, cruel relatives live in a quiet, beautiful country, and try to understand a religion of quietness, gentleness, and beauty...but they can understand it only through the twisted minds they have in common, which means that their violence destroys it.

The uncle dies, straightforwardly enough, from a stroke caused by the cardiovascular disease his choices have been hastening on for years. He is eighty-four, fat, a big meat eater and heavy drinker, and when fourteen-year-old Tarwater gets drunk on his uncle’s liquor, it’s not as if being drunk is unfamiliar to the boy. Nevertheless Tarwater gets frustrated by the work of digging the grave and lifting the uncle’s 200-pound body, and ends up burning down the house with his dead uncle in it before fleeing to his other surviving relative, his uncle Rayber.

The dead uncle, Old Tarwater, was a devout Protestant of some sort—not, apparently, a Baptist—but his religion only colored his outbursts of violent insanity. His salvation, perhaps, has been his ability to protect and nurture young Tarwater; the quality of his nurturance has left a great deal to be desired but the boy is physically healthy and, apparently, as sane as any of his family can be.

Rayber has convinced himself that, by being a devout atheist, he’s suppressed his own violent insanity...except that now and then he knows he’s not completely suppressed it. He, too, has been saved from his psychosis by his ability to protect and nurture his son, whose brain damage is more visible than Rayber’s and the two Tarwaters’ violent episodes.

Old Tarwater has told young Tarwater that the boy will inherit his “gift of prophecy” and must baptize his feeble-minded cousin. Rayber tells young Tarwater that the boy must reject religious faith in order to stay sane. Of course, Rayber says, handing Tarwater a glass of water, he can pour a little water over his cousin’s head, if it will make him feel better. It won’t hurt the smaller boy much. Tarwater rejects this idea of mock baptism in front of his mocking uncle. Rayber applauds this choice of sanity, and starts leaving the children alone together.

Nevertheless, when the inevitable happens, Rayber knows what’s happened to his son as well as if he’d been watching, and understands that he’s merely used Tarwater to carry out his own violent impulse...this time. By the end of the story two of these four lunatics are still breathing, but we know they won’t be for long.

The great mistake people have made in interpreting this novel, I believe, is reading it as a statement about “The South” or about something typically Southern. It is of course typical of the small-town South that legends about what became of a family of bad men, long ago, continued to be retold for years after all the characters were dead, but B.A. Botkin collected similar legends in the North. Flannery O’Connor set her story in the place where she chose to live. People do not choose to live in places where stories like this one would be considered typical.

I read it as more of a religious statement. O’Connor was a Catholic; for her Old Tarwater’s Protestant religion was all wrong and had no power to save, but Rayber’s dogmatic atheism was evil and had power to destroy.

Alternatively the story can be read as embroidery on the feminist cliché that “When men are left alone together they’re always in bad company”; the psychotic family has no living women, and possibly that’s what’s wrong with the men.

Or it can be read as what I suspect it may have been written to be—pure horror, the story of an adolescent whose struggles against his genetic fate only set him more firmly in the trap of insanity and violent death. O’Connor’s father had died young from lupus; in 1950 O’Connor had nearly died from the same disease. It’s possible that she was motivated to write about a young man doomed to hereditary insanity as a way to think about being a young woman doomed to hereditary pain, disability, disfigurement, and premature death. It was probably her religious faith, although she wrote little about it for most of her life, that allowed O’Connor to live out her days with her sanity intact, as her body self-destructed. Imagining what her life would have been like without that faith might have been all the inspiration she needed to create the Raybers and the Tarwaters.

O’Connor, according to those who knew her, laughed hysterically when she read parts of this and her other stories aloud. Despite the close and not unempathetic attention she gave them, for her her fictional characters were “freaks, not folks,” distinguished mainly by their lack of resemblance to anybody she actually knew. I didn’t catch myself even smiling as I read The Violent Bear It Away. In some of O’Connor’s short stories, and in parts of the tragic novel Wise Blood, I do find chortles. For me the tone of The Violent Bear It Away alternates among the three reactions Stephen King described as terror, horror, and gross-out.

Are there people who need to be reminded that dogmatic atheism is as inherently demented as any other form of psychotic religiosity? I don’t know. Would The Violent Bear It Away work, for them, as a warning? I don’t know. Is its redeeming value, in the end, its insight into the psyche of a talented writer facing painful premature death? Possibly. Anyway, if any Stephen King fans out there have been advised to write a term paper on something considered “better literature,” this book is for you.