The Violent Bear It Away

The Violent Bear It Away is a fiction novel published in 1960 by the American author Flannery O’Connor. Written in O’Connor’s trademark Southern Gothic style, the book chronicles the inner turmoil of a 14-year-old boy from rural Tennessee as he struggles against his destiny of becoming a prophet. It is an expansion of O’Connor’s 1955 short story, “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” which is presented here as the book’s first chapter.

This study guide refers to the 2007 edition published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Plot Summary

For his entire life, 14-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater is groomed by his mentally ill great uncle Mason to become a Christian prophet like himself. Having lost his mother in a car accident and his father in a subsequent suicide, the infant Tarwater is initially raised by his uncle Rayber, an atheist schoolteacher. At only a few months old, Tarwater is kidnapped by Mason to a rural plot of land known as Powderhead. When Rayber and a social worker named Bernice attempt to retrieve Tarwater a few days later, Mason shoots Rayber in the leg and ear, causing the schoolteacher to take no further action to recover the boy.