She encourages him to return to preaching, seeing his blindness as a new attraction for his audience. Flood is perplexed not just by Motes’ self-blinding but his sudden reclusiveness. She is nosey, talkative, holds religion at arm’s length, and is practical to a fault. She is immediately recognizable as another of the respectable, middle-aged Southern white ladies who populate O’Connor’s fiction. įrom here on, we see Motes’s final days exclusively from Mrs.
“Blind myself,” he said and went on in the house. Flood watches him mix the lime and water in the bucket with growing interest: After a sardonic police officer has destroyed his clunky car, Haze returns to the boardinghouse with quicklime and a bucket he has bought at a hardware store. Hazel Motes, O’Connor’s tormented protagonist, is driven by forces beyond his control to become a self-styled preacher for his Church Without Christ as he wanders the streets of Tauklinham, Georgia, filled with O’Connor’s comic Southern grotesqueries.įor much of the novel, we see events through the eyes of Haze in third-person close, but as he approaches his final martyrdom, O’Connor pulls away from Haze and only allows us to see his decline and death from the point of view of a character we have barely met before, his landlady Mrs.
“Freedom is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in the 10th anniversary Signet edition of her first novel Wise Blood.
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