![]() ![]() Then, in contradiction, he embarks on his own mission as a prophet – to convert a younger uncle, a professor in the pagan city, and to baptize the man’s idiot son. In violence to the uncles memory and influence the boy sets fire to the farm house. Virtually all this prophesying was to do with the boy’s own responsibilities as a prophet.īut now the uncle has died, and the boy has got drunk on the prophet’s moonshine. The central figure is 14-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater, reared on a wilderness farm by a religious fanatic uncle who claimed to be a prophet and who was for four years an asylum inmate. Much of the action takes place near a small town, Powerhead, Tennessee, and in a larger city, perhaps Memphis or Chattanooga. ![]() Miss O’ Connor deals with four characters, two boys and two men, in a short span of time and space. This surely will be remembered as one of the most important works of fiction of the present year. Suffice it to say that The Violent Bear It Away is the best of her three books and that a comparison between this neo-Gothic tale and the novels written by William Faulkner at the height of his literary powers, could in no way harm Miss O’Connor. Excerpted from review of The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor in The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri), March, 1960: Flannery O’Connor, a comparatively young Southern woman, writes with such skill and control that to praise her novel to excess would come easily and willingly. ![]()
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