The Violent Bear It Away

The early chapters of Part 2 mark a shift in that the dominant perspective and narrative voice now belong to Rayber rather than Tarwater. Perhaps the greatest significance of this shift is that Rayber—unlike Tarwater who seems to act without fully understanding why—possesses an overbearing sense of self-awareness that causes him to examine the purported meaning behind his every action and attitude. This is partially due to his worship of intellectualism, which to Rayber is a religion of its own, dictating that anything worthwhile can be understood, if studied with sufficient vigor. Yet in Rayber’s hands, intellectualism has at least as many deficiencies as religion. First, it is ill-suited to treating the intractable nature of Tarwater, whose backwoods arrogance makes him all but immune to Rayber’s attempts to reach the boy, rooted as they are in cold logic. Of even greater significance is intellectual secularism’s inability to solve the problem of guilt and forgiveness, concepts that fall firmly under the purview of religion.

This emerges in two major ways. The first involves the guilt Rayber feels at having been unwilling to return to Powderhead to retrieve Tarwater after Mason shoots him. This guilt—and the corresponding resentment Tarwater feels at having been betrayed—haunts all of the pair’s interactions and poisons any attempt by Rayber to help guide the boy toward a place of healing. Had Rayber merely sought forgiveness from Tarwater, it is possible that the boy would have been carried off the path toward a violent destiny. However, forgiveness is a concept that exists outside of Rayber’s strictly rational worldview which rejects all matters of the spirit. The second lies in Rayber’s dismissive attitude toward Tarwater’s own guilt over depriving Mason of a Christian burial, referring to it as “a terrible false guilt” (106). Rayber doesn’t even provide Tarwater with recognition of his transgression, because he believes no transgression has taken place.

Consider also Rayber’s insistence on using the language of psychology to describe Tarwater’s desire to baptize Bishop. At various intervals, Rayber describes it as a “compulsion” or “one of your fixations” (144). In treating it as a psychological ailment rather than as the result of a deep-seated indoctrination of beliefs and rituals, Rayber is destined to fail in his attempts to “cure” Tarwater. For example, Rayber believes that the only way to rid Tarwater of his baptism-fixation is to show the boy “the ridiculous absurdity of performing the empty rite” (146). Yet for a youth who spends the entirety of his 14-year existence in the sole company of a man who raves about seeing “wheels of light and strange beasts with giant wings of fire” (8), there is little reference point by which Tarwater can judge what is absurd and what is not by Rayber’s standards.

Nowhere is Rayber’s blind allegiance to reason more troubling than in the man’s approach toward love and passion. By his logic, love and passion, as fundamentally irrational concepts, can only lead to the kind of foolishness embodied by Mason. Therefore, Rayber feels he must check all emotional impulses, whether it be his love for his own son or his rage at Tarwater’s impetuousness. Rayber’s affection for Bishop “was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant” (113). Yet by embracing a life of emotional emptiness out of fear of turning into Mason, Rayber remains as much a slave to his great uncle as Tarwater. Witness the intense pain Rayber suffers during the sermon at the Pentecostal tabernacle, during which his intellectual mind is no match for the flood of memories from Powderhead that overwhelm him. Rayber’s secular intellectualism—toward which he is arguably as fanatical as Mason is to Christ—is a poor mechanism for overcoming trauma, fear, and guilt.

Which isn’t to say that Mason’s extreme brand of religious fundamentalism is healthy or even consistent with Christian values as O’Connor views them. O’Connor’s personal views on religion espouse the importance of questioning one’s faith. In response to a student stricken with doubts about his faith, she wrote, “I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience you are having right now of unbelief” (O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 1988.) Yet questioning one’s faith requires a sense of humility Mason simply does not possess—for to be a prophet is to be certain of one’s divine mission, lest one incurs the kind of wrath God exhibited toward Jonah when He dropped him in the belly of a whale for refusing to deliver his prophecies.

By contrast, Tarwater possesses a huge measure of doubt, largely because of the Satanic voice in his head. He too is hardly a model for Christian humility, exhibiting an enormous amount of outwardly-directed arrogance, particularly toward Rayber. For Rayber, this arrogance is given form by Tarwater’s ubiquitous straw hat, a symbol of stubbornness that he never removes. When Rayber pursues Tarwater on the way to the tabernacle, for example, “Rayber saw only the hat, intransigently ground upon his head, fierce-looking even in the dim light. It had the boy’s own defiant quality, as if its shape had been formed over the years by his personality” (119).

Yet perhaps Rayber misreads the symbol. While the schoolteacher can view the hat as nothing more or less than a personal attack, for its wearer the hat is a marker of individualism, protecting him from the two cultural forces battling for his soul. Consider young Tarwater’s distress at having lost his hat when it falls out the window of the attorney’s office. Without the hat, Tarwater is unmoored from his own past and identity, a reality that comes into focus near the end of the book following the act of violence that deprives him of his signature headgear.