First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle - that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensue, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.

O'Connor observes all this with an astonishing combination of irony and compassion, humor and pathos. The result is a novel whose range and depth reveal a brilliant and innovative writer acutely alert to where the sacred lives and where it does not.

Listening Length

6 hours and 15 minutes
Author

Flannery O’ Connor
Narrator

Mark Bramhall
Audible release date

September 2, 2010
Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Audio, Inc.
ASIN

B0041OAOYI
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	6 hours and 15 minutes
Author	Flannery O’ Connor
Narrator	Mark Bramhall
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	September 02, 2010
Publisher	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0041OAOYI
Best Sellers Rank	#126,551 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #3,610 in Classic Literature (Audible Books & Originals) #7,277 in Historical Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #15,566 in Classic Literature & Fiction

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

387 global ratings

5 star		59%
4 star		21%
3 star		11%
2 star		3%
1 star		6%

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fra7299

Troubling, disturbing, violent, profound. O'Connor forces us to think.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 31, 2020

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This is such a strange book. I don’t know if it is better to review it or just give a list of thoughts and impressions without any rhyme or reason. Depending on how the reader goes about reading The Violent Bear It Away, said reader may find it repulsive, bizarre, enlightening, profound, or maybe just a combination of any or all of the above. Clearly this is a book that works very strongly in allegory and symbolism, so I think it best to take what is taking place on the surface level and find the symbolic aspect of it. In other words, in my opinion, this is a book best not taken at its face value.

And the one thing about reading O’Connor: she forces the reader to think. Through dark characters, elements, symbolism, conflict and themes, she not only makes a reader uncomfortable, but challenges their perceptions and values through these elements. Reading O’Connor is never a light or passive experience; she thrusts you (whether you are ready or not) quite often into a deeply troubled individual’s conscience and lets you stew around a bit and have to think with them. You must come to some conclusion along with them.

We see this in her final novel (and perhaps her most challenging) in the case of Francis Marion Tarwater. He is a teenager torn between the religious world of his fanatical great uncle , Mason Tarwater, has set for him and the atheistic world of his school teacher uncle, Rayber. Within this division, young Tarwater also encounters many forces and conflicts (physical, emotional) within the world that tempt him, or force him towards deciding to take one path or another. These two paths are pitted against each other and at odds in Tarwater’s conscience for the duration of the novel.

I think O’Conner has a profound way of capturing this conflict in her prose:
“…his mind had been engaged in a continual struggle with the silence that confronted him…It was a strange waiting silence. It seemed to lie all around him like an invisible country whose borders he was always on the edge of, always in danger of crossing.”

I have to say that that final chapter is quite profound. O’Connor really turns it up a notch and puts everything together so convincingly (at least, in my mind she does). There is such a sophisticated level of symbolism, a deeply intricate level of figurative meaning that I had to go back and reread passages a few times and read slower so I wouldn’t miss anything. O’Connor really ties it all together yet still manages to leave room for interpretation. It really was one of the more ponderous chapters I’ve read in a long time.

One of the rewards of reading O’Connor and her novel The Violent Bear it Away is that she continually makes the reader active and thinking about possibilities. I’ll be the first to profess that I’m still trying to put all the pieces together for this novel, but one of the beauties of reading is that we can find our own interpretations. The Violent Bear It Away is such a book that allows for various levels of analysis and discussion; it is not an easy experience by any means, but it's a book you can come back to and find a new level of interpretation. But, that’s totally fine, because I think we as readers need to be challenged to find meaning.

That being said, I do not believe this is the work for the first time reader of O'Connor to begin with. I think it would be best to begin with some of the stories in her collection. These stories often carry the same themes as her novels, but are a smaller sample size and a bit more focused and compact in their telling.

Although The Violent Bear It Away is at times dark, grotesque, and troubling, I think it is a profound work.

20 people found this helpful

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Abigail

Got what I was expecting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2022

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Good book. Bought it for a class and it arrived in good condition and served me well.

Helpful

Beautiful Writing, Disturbing Message

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 25, 2013

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Considering the number of dissertations written on this novel and the amount of O'Connor scholarship occupying shelf space in university libraries, I'm not sure what pertinent analysis I can add of "The Violent Bear it Away," so I'll stick to my personal reflections on returning to O'Connor's work after twenty years. I was in high school when I first encountered the author's assortment of criminals, con-men, and religious zealots. Back then I was drawn to her morbid sense of humor; I think her writing appealed to some latent mean streak in me. Reading O'Connor's work now, I can't help feeling that something essential is missing from it. "The Violent..." is perhaps the most unrelenting and extreme form of Southern gothic literature. O'Connor's prose is always graceful, her metaphors striking, yet with this novel I couldn't help noting how every comparison served solely to make its subject appear more threatening, ominous, sinister. After awhile I could practically hear the score from an old horror movie playing in the background. O'Connor has peopled the book almost exclusively with detestable characters. Mason Tarwater is an old man living in near-seclusion with his great-nephew, Francis Tarwater. Mason, a fundamentalist obsessed with prophets and baptisms, was institutionalized for four years before he learned to stop proselytizing. He kidnapped Francis and managed to brainwash him. Francis, whose parents were killed in a car accident, is a teen when the old man dies. Francis burns down the house with Mason's body inside rather than burying him and sets out to find his Uncle Rayber, a schoolteacher living with his developmentally challenged son, Bishop. Francis and Rayber are polar opposites: while Francis represents unthinking conviction, Rayber stands for intellectual secularism. Rayber trumpets his self-discipline to Tarwater, which the boy merely sees as weakness. All of the book's characters represent a type and none of them become fully-formed individuals, although Rayber may come the closest. O'Connor liked to give her characters symbolic names, as in an old morality play, yet the moral here remains opaque. Wise or unschooled, believer or non-believer, it appears to make no difference. Everyone in "The Violent..." is equally doomed, and this hints at the absence I described earlier. There's no question about the singularity of O'Connor's vision, but it's a black and white vision, unable to admit shades of gray. For all her apparent interest in spirituality, there's a puzzling coldness to her characterizations, a misanthropic strain to her work that makes it seem (unintentionally) comical after awhile, caricatured, closer to the grotesque than to literature. She doesn't seem to like people and doesn't make much effort to understand them. Strangely, women are almost entirely absent. The only female voice we hear in "The Violent" is that of a young crippled evangelist. Faulkner seemed interested in the social and historical circumstances shaping his characters, but O'Connor's characters are divorced from any historical context. Tarwater and Rayber pass through the city without seeing anything noteworthy. Even a sandwhich, thrust into Tarwater's hand, becomes an alien object. The teen appears to be O'Connor's appointed hero, yet he's stubborn, contemptuous, eventually murderous. I'm not arguing that protagonists need to be heroic or even particularly ethical, but they do need complexity. "The Violent..." seems more like an exercise or game where the pieces are manipulated to some ambiguous end than to a novel exploring the human condition.

13 people found this helpful

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W Perry Hall

Violence to Youth of Good Ol' Fundamentalism

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 24, 2015

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If you were raised in the rural South or spent the summertime there with someone in your WASP family, you may still suffer the occasional nightmare, as I do, from the trauma left by hellfire and brimstone sermons or a fundamentalist Sunday "school" or two, having been left at an impressionable age (8 to 14) with the constant fear that you and all who have not yet been saved will be eternally damned if you do not save them from this blasphemous world, and spooked by the bountiful ignorance that surrounded you.

Flannery O'Connor, a devout Catholic, was super-critical of fundamentalist Protestants. Her short stories and two novels either explored dark religious themes or were tinged with often morbid religious undertones.

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY's title is taken from a verse in the Douay-Rhiens Catholic Bible at Matthew 11:12: "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

I'll forego delving into possible meanings of the title, and any discussion of the novel gives away what happens at and near the end of the book. I'll just say that it's a BRUTAL book, dealing with a 14-year-old boy, fanatical, Southern fundamentalists and the related themes of destruction and redemption.

If you are looking for an enjoyable summer read, perhaps you should look elsewhere. If you'd like to get a sampling of the deeply dark, morbid and haunting world of Southern fundamentalist ol' time religion, purchase now.

35 people found this helpful

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Maryanne Zielinski

What did I actually read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 21, 2022

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I don’t know if there was a structure to the book or if I didn’t comprehend it or what but it seemed to go in a million different directions at once with nothing really making sense

One person found this helpful

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Bluecashmere.

A powerful, original novel.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 4, 2012

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This is a powerful, disturbing and almost eccentric novel. Certainly it is difficult to imagine its creation from any mind other than its author, and rooted though the narrative is in rural Georgia, I'm not quite sure how the novel fits into the Southern Gothic category. But then highly original writing transcends categories. As a Roman Catholic it may seem strange that Flannery O'Connor is here concerned with Old Testament fundamentalism, or something closely akin to it, and with what amounts to modern secularism. Indeed, what seems to me to give the book its special force is the battle between reason and passion, the latter often the more powerful because it comes from the mouths of those isolated from the mainstream of society and not unsurprisingly lacking fluent, articulate expression. This is a world very far removed from that of Graeme Greene another distinctive Catholic novelist, urbane and educated, but then his background could scarcely be more different from O'Connor's. Until well into her adult years it is claimed that her speech was all but incomprehensible to those brought up with standard, educated American. Is the title triumphant in meaning and spirit, or is some of that irony that readers see in her writing present here too? For me reading this book is a little like what I imagine experiencing some inexplicable force of nature to be. It defies explanation but makes its inescapable impact.

5 people found this helpful

Stephen Sharp

Don't bother reading it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 18, 2021

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Could not finish it. Tedious. Enough material for a short story of 3 pages.

One person found this helpful

Clara

Unique

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 31, 2019

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Totally unique voice. Very good.

Daryl

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 9, 2015

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Good product speedy service

Bruno Leite

Trabalhoso, porém, justifica esse.

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on February 10, 2019

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Excelente livro para quem não tem receio em trilhar um caminho abandonado por nós. Realizações difíceis mas necessárias. Fale o tempo nele despendido, mesmo que a realização final não seja uma do seu agrado.

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