Surprisingly, not all literature lovers share that love for the stories of Flannery O’Connor. They are disturbed by the strangeness of her characters. Those familiar with the works of Flannery O’Connor know the characters of her stories most often embody such a nature as can only be described by grotesque. Some of her characters even take the form of a distorted Ubermensch (Nietzsche’s Superman) whose conquests are typically carried out as unsuccessful acts of trying to prove their disbelief in God.
For example, In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Tarwater repeatedly tells his uncle Rayber (a modernist school teacher) that he is different than him because all Rayber can do is talk about his unbelief, but he (Tarwater) is capable of acting. At dinner just before Tarwater drowns Bishop, Rayber’s “afflicted child,” Tarwater tells his uncle, “It ain’t the same… I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.”
After he drowns the boy and makes for home, he tells the stranger with whom he hitches a ride, “I baptized him… it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… the words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again… I only meant to drown him… you’re only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water.”
Tarwater carries on with the driver, disconcerted and shaken about the ordeal, not because he drowned a boy, but because he accidentally baptized him in the process. He laments the words of baptism escaped his lips as he pushed the retarded child under the water.
By drowning the boy he believes he was called by God to baptize, Tarwater attempts to overcome his “bad conscience,” a conscience he believes had been spoiled by the Christian moral ideal instilled in him by his Uncle Tarwater, the crazy prophet who had kidnapped him and taken him to the woods to raise him. Drowning the boy was a way of unwedding his conscience from the “unnatural inclinations” of Christianity which Nietzsche suggested ran counter “to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short, any ideal hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.”
Since everyone is finally aware there is no God–“God is dead”–Nietzsche had opined that in order for the modern world to avoid its inevitable plunge into the great nausea of nihilism, it would require a man with a “different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age.”
The characteristics of such a man “would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health.”
Flannery O’Connor gave the modern world a vision of such a man in characters like Francis Marion Tarwater. By making her characters grotesque, Flannery O’Connor was subtly–or maybe not so subtly–confronting modern thought and ethics.