A Peculiar Hunger

"'You want to avoid extremes. They are for violent people
and you don't want . . .'" (420).

Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960), chps 5-12

1. why does Rayber continue to parent Bishop instead of institutionalizing him?
2. why does Rayber have, not only Bishop as a son, but a hearing impairment and an awkward gait?  That is, why might O’Connor allow his life to be so thoroughly inundated with disability issues?
3. why does Rayber have, not only Bishop as a son, but a hearing impairment and an awkward gait?  Why might O’Connor allow his life to be so thoroughly inundated with disability concerns?
4. does the Carmody child’s disability make her pitiable?
5. O’Connor weaves Rayber’s seven-year-old memories about old Tarwater into the message spoken by the Carmodys for Christ (408-15) in an effort to reveal what about Rayber’s motivations in the past, present, and future?
6. Rayber has loudly declared that he wants to help young Tarwater become a man (388). Does this project involve giving Tarwater greater latitude than he was given by Old Tarwater?  How much freedom does Rayber grant his nephew?
7. does Rayber provide Tarwater refuge when the boy wants it?
8. what key elements undergird Rayber’s attempt to parent young Frank Tarwater?  What, that is, motivates his actions, and what emotions dominate his interactions with young Tarwater?
9. how valid are Rayber’s perceptions, as concerns young Tarwater, the Carmody child, and Bishop?
10. is Rayber’s psychoanalytic diagnosis of Tarwater accurate --his claim that Tarwater is still chained to his dead great-uncle (435), and that the boy is not in control of his own actions but under the sway of unconscious forces (436)?  Can he, as he claims, “‘read [Tarwater] like a book’” (438)?
11. what “secret truth” about Rayber is Tarwater slowly figuring out?
12. when Rayber and young Tarwater confront one another and throw around accusations informed by the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20), whose claims seem more accurate (448-50)?
13. is violence an intrinsic evil in this tale?
14. Rayber usually considers his past with old Tarwater a case he has “analysed [. . .] and closed” (408).  How accurate is this self-assessment?
15. what action does young Tarwater feel compelled to enact and does he, ultimately, succeed in his efforts to restrain himself?
16. does the advice given Tarwater by the disembodied voice merit his new designation as “friend” instead of “stranger”?
17. to what cause can Tarwater’s insatiable hunger be traced?
18. what is that “strange waiting silence” that confronts Tarwater (429)?
19. is Tarwater an effective mouthpiece for modernity?  Does what he declares about such matters as the unconscious (436), self-reliance (437), compulsion (421, 446, 450), and saving oneself (450-51) accord with twenty-first century common sense?
20. of the various roles played by Bishop in this book, which is the most important?
21. why might O'Connor have named this novella The Violent Bear It Away? What do you make of the epigraph, drawn from Matthew 11:12?

Around the Circle (1950)
Wassily Kandinsky

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu