Alienated Modern Man

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is one of the most important Southern female writers in the postwar America. Wise Blood is O'Conner's first novel and since its publication in 1952 it has always been regarded as a book difficult to understand with its absurd plot, grotesque characters, gothic horror, complex system of symbols and images. It is only after the publication of her other works that the novel becomes gradually accessible to readers and more critics are drawn to the interpretation of its seemingly unfathomable themes. In this thesis, the author blazes a new path to the interpretation of the main character Hazel Motes in the novel Wise Blood.Wise Blood, her first novel about Hazel Motes' tragedy. He loses faith in God in the army and sets up a "Church without Christ" to compete with orthodox Christianity. However, in the process of preaching, he is exposed to sins such as greed, hypocrisy, indifference and so on. Hazel Motes himself is also driven to commit adultery, blaspheme God and even kill a fake preacher. Thus Hazel Motes is burdened with mental shacks. Finally, he blinds himself and dies to gain so-called eternal life of the soul.This paper analyzes Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood with Freud's "tripartite model of the mind" theory, and tries to find the clues to the alienation of his behavior. Hazel Motes,full of impractical illusions,alienated himself from friendship, affection, religion and the society, due to his abnormal personality development. In addition, his self-rejection symbolized his success in fighting against his ego and reaching his superego.