Hazel Faults Journey

In the Flannery O’Connor’s great book, “Wise blood”, Hazel motes, the main character of the literature, is a hero struggling against his prophetic vocation, yet turning out to be a Christian martyr at the end of his long and futile ordeals. The development of the literature centers around the protagonist’s struggle to run away from Jesus, who poses Jesus as “something awful,” and his final return to him. Hazel’s movement throughout the literature, therefore, may be seen as a journey: a modern man’s progress from rebellion against God, to penance, and to return to him through the painful recognition of his sinful and fallen nature. The shrill thesis of the literature is stressed by its circular journey pattern of escape from and return to God.
As a child, Hazel Motes is indoctrinated in religious fundamentalism by his grandfather, “a circuit preacher, a waspish old man… with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger” (9). Time after time young Haze hears the searing sermon of his Bible-thumping grandfather who, in front of a crowd, would point to his grandson, “that mean sinful unthinking boy,” and pronounced him “redeemed”: “That boy had been redeemed and Jesus was not going to leave him ever…. Jesus would have him in the end!” (10). Understanding Jesus as the “soul-hungry” devourer, as “something awful,” the boy very early comes to the conclusion that “the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin” and, at the age of twelve, decides to follow the preacher’s calling like his grandfather. Furthermore, Haze’s mother, with “a cross-shaped face” reinforces the fundament- alist piety in her son by equating the boy’s germination sexuality with sin. Her chilling question “what you seen?,” to the shame-faced boy who just had a peek at a naked w...

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Hazel Motes undergoes the most painful until he return to the truth. The circular journey pattern points up the theme of the literature that the impossibility to escape the prophetic call and the tremendous price that a man has to pay for his willful transgression of the divine order. The path toward God who demands nothing less everything is the most excruciation one: at the end of the journey, Haze has to lose his physical sight to attain a spiritual vision and his life to make a breakthrough from the sordid earthly existence. In the preface to Wise Blood, O’Connor wrote that Haze’s integrity lies in his “not being able” to get rid of the “ragged figure” of Jesus. Wise Blood is, after all, a chronicle of a Christian who paradoxically achieves the heroic stature by failing triumphantly to run away from God, who “would chase him over the waters of sin.”