Wise Blood

Identity is an extremely important theme in Wise Blood, one that is mainly evident in relation to the protagonist, Hazel Motes. Motes comes a very religious family, and his grandfather was once a traveling preacher. By the time the novel begins, however, Motes has completely disavowed his Christian beliefs. He enters Taulkinham dressed in a blue suit and his grandfather’s hat, and other characters repeatedly mistake him for a preacher. As the book progresses, Motes fulfills his destiny of becoming a preacher by becoming a type of “anti-preacher.” He stands on the hood of his car, just as his grandfather did before him, and preaches to the people of Taulkinham. His message is not one of Christianity, however, but the absence of it: “I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied” (139). Motes is never able to get any kind of real following for his church, so neither his newfound (anti-)preacher identity and atheistic beliefs are never really affirmed. At the end of the novel, Motes walks out into an ice storm with his shoes filled with rocks and his eyes blinded by quicklime: it’s not clear whether this was an attempt to shed his anti-preacher identity by accepting Christ or an attempt to fully embrace his absence of belief and thus his identity.