Spiritual Quests In Wise Blood: Flannery O'Connor's View Of Salvation

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is one of the most important Southern writers in American literature. Living in the chaotic modern world and being a pious Catholic writer, O'Connor sensitively perceives the great changes happened in postbellum America, especially the spiritual blankness and religious paralysis in the modern world, which she thinks should be responsible for all the sins, crimes, and moral degenerations that prevail n the western society. She worries about these problems and always expresses her thinking of "God's grace" in her works. She believes that only Christianity can save people and guide them to the good old days of kindness, tolerance, generosity, and benevolence.Wise Blood is O'Connor's first novel which illustrates clearly her worries about the modern world and her religious salvation. The novel fictionalizes a modern city Taulkinham and expresses O'Connor's thought that men are born evil and only Jesus can save people's soul through the depiction of two opposite characters, Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery. Instead of directly preaching and advocating her view of salvation, O'Connor puts her characters in a similar situation of spiritual predicaments and religious crisis, and focuses on their different spiritual quests due to their differences in characteristics and beliefs. Their opposite choices bring about different results. Through opposition and comparison, and the approval and disapproval that embodied in the depiction of the characters, O'Connor shows the reader her view of religious salvation.This thesis probes into and anatomizes the religious salvation that O'Connor implies in the text. Some concepts in her view of salvation such as conversion, reason and faith, pain, suffering, death and rebirth, and her refutation of Sartre's freedom of choice, etc., are explained and studied.We cannot deny the positive effect of O'Connor's religious salvation in preventing the further corruption of social morals in Christ haunted America, but we should also notice that O'Connor's view of salvation, lacking the support of science, is an idealized one. Thus it cannot solve all the social problems in a thorough way.