41 pages • 1 hour read
Flannery O'ConnorA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The book contains many references to Biblical prophets, but none is mentioned as frequently as Jonah. In the Old Testament, God sends Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh to cease their sinful ways or else face divine wrath. When Jonah attempts to shirk his responsibilities as a prophet, God casts him into the sea where he is swallowed by a whale. There he remains in the whale’s stomach for three days before God commands the beast to vomit, allowing Jonah to escape.
Like Jonah, Tarwater is a reluctant prophet, charged with castigating the sinners of a city, who only accepts his mission following enormous pain and suffering. When this suffering does not promptly arrive, the friend references Jonah in mockery, telling Tarwater, “If you are a prophet, it’s only right you should be treated like one. When Jonah dallied, he was cast three days in a belly of darkness and vomited up in the place of his mission” (161). This suffering does eventually afflict Tarwater, beginning shortly after he desecrates the rite of baptism by drowning Bishop. Sitting in the cab of a truck on the way to Powderhead, Tarwater suffers convulsive nightmares: “He might have been Jonah clinging wildly to the whale’s tongue” (216). Finally, his ordeal culminates in the sexual assault in the woods, which breaks his spirit of defiance and leads him closer to accepting his destiny.
For most of the narrative, Tarwater never removes his trademark straw hat. It stays on his head when he sleeps and even when he removes his coveralls to swim in the lake. While Tarwater never expresses the reason why it always stays on his head, the hat can be interpreted as a symbol of defiance. This is true from the perspective of Rayber, who says the hat expresses “the boy’s own defiant quality” (119). At another point, Rayber describes Tarwater’s “filthy hat, the stinking overalls, worn defiantly like a national costume” (149).
Though while Rayber views the hat as a personal affront against his rehabilitative efforts, this is insufficient for explaining why Tarwater leaves the hat on even in moments of privacy, or why he dissolves into panic at losing the hat out of the lawyer’s window during his lone visit to the city with Mason. To Tarwater, the hat may be a symbol of his assumed independence from the forces that wish to manipulate him toward this or that destiny. It is a talisman, protecting him from these forces both inside and outside his own brain. Thus when the rapist steals the hat from him, he can no longer resist his fate, arriving at his destiny as a prophet shortly thereafter.
Perhaps in keeping with a book with so many Biblical allusions, the two dominant motifs of The Violent Bear It Away are fire and water. Like the prophet Ezekiel when he resists delivering God’s prophecies, “the Lord had corrected [Mason] with fire” (6), cleansing him in preparation for becoming a vessel for the divine word. Yet fire can also be a tool of the blasphemer, as when Tarwater attempts to cremate his great uncle and deny him a Christian burial. Indeed, the fires set by Tarwater have a unique duality to them. On one hand, his act of arson is committed in direct defiance of his destiny as a prophet. At the end of the book, however, the underbrush he sets aflame to cuts him off from the friend, symbolizing the burning bush through which God speaks to Moses and anoints him as a prophet.
Water, meanwhile, is positioned not in opposition to fire but rather as a second duality representing both destruction and exaltation. Again, this is most clearly expressed in the simultaneous baptism and drowning of Bishop, showing that water kills as easily as it blesses. It also plays a role in Tarwater’s own dual baptism, when Rayber defiantly baptizes the boy’s backside to infuriate Mason.
The bread of life is the name of a discourse found in the Gospel of John in the New Testament. In it, Jesus feeds 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread and proclaims himself “the bread of life.” The concept is a dominant presence in nearly all of Mason’s sermons and is a significant symbol on Tarwater’s road toward divine enlightenment. This hunger for spiritual nourishment is noticeably absent from Tarwater until Mason’s death: “In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain, undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life” (21).
This changes however after Tarwater murders Bishop. Despite feeling enormously hungry, he finds that the thought of food nauseates him. It isn’t until he returns to Powderhead after the rape to find Mason’s grave that he acknowledges his hunger for the bread of life he had once rejected. Having denied this hunger for so long, the bread of life becomes something of a new fixation for Tarwater, a more robust animating force than the baptism of Bishop and a signifier that his destiny is complete.
By Flannery O'Connor