Carl Jung, a famous psychiatrist, once said, "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." That is to say, a person with enough insight into his or herself develops a true understanding of their own qualities. This idea can be applied to Flannery O'Connor's novel, Wise Blood, in various precedents. In Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, the narrator employs the unconscious complexities that many of the characters have, as well as the Jungian archetypes that many of them categorically fall into in order to highlight not only the characters' grotesque, mental qualities, but also the emotional distresses that the characters may suffer from throughout the novel.
Enoch Emery develops a messiah complex through the course of the novel, which inevitably illustrates to the readers his delusion of self-importance. For instance, when Enoch Emery is talking to Hazel Motes, he says, "'You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,' he said, 'but you ain't! I'm the one has it. Not you. Me.'" (Page 55). Within a short span of meeting Hazel Motes, Enoch Emery feels that he has a goal to fulfill in life, one that all the other characters cannot comprehend. His insistence on how he has inherited the gift of "wise blood" from his father implies that he feels a sense of grandeur, especially with respect to the characters that he meets. Furthermore, in the museum, after getting hit in the forehead by Hazel, "Enoch Emery knew now that his life would never be the same again, because the thing that was going to happen to him had started to happen" (Page 129). He essentially awakens with an innate sense of purpose and destiny. As a result, his personality drastically changes as he prepares to justify his "daddy's blood" (Page 129). The way that Enoch Emery reacts to the conflict between him and Hazel Motes implies that he is delusional in terms of gauging his self-importance.
