The Violent Bear it Away

            In our collective exploration of religious themes in literature, I think it is incredibly useful to set up a comparison of Flannery O"Conner's The Violent Bear it Away and The Lame Shall Enter First. These two works seem to be, in many ways, the same characters creating the same story. However, she wrote Violent Bear it Away in 1960 and The Lame Shall Enter First in 1962. Going as far to, then, call The Lame Shall Enter a sort of retelling of The Violent Bear It Away it is interesting to consider in what ways the works are similar, what common statement O"Conner was making with both, and what literary changes she explored in writing the latter. .
             In a letter to Cecil Dawkins in 1958, O"Connor writes: "The notion of the perfectibility of man came about at the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own unaided efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgment is out of place because man is not responsible." This interpretation of Liberal Atheism seems to be the skeleton to both Sheppard and Rayber. When first writing this reaction, I was going through great lengths to show the many similarities of the characters as a means for proof of my thesis, but I think the correlation is pretty obvious. Less similar, but still obviously correlated are the characters, Rufus Johnson and Frank Tarwater. The least similarly correlated characters are Norton and Bishop. The stories are similar on a number of levels. Both are built around a theme of the conflict between the liberal atheist views, the beliefs of a certain southern brand of Christianity, and the failure of both. Even in miniscule details, the author sets up similar stories, with the way the Liberal self-riotously eats cereal every morning, and the back-woods Christian fanatic sleeping in the bed of the missing mother.