Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood centers on Hazel Motes, an East Tennessean released from four years of army service who has things to do that he had never done before, namely, to show that he didn’t need Jesus. O’Connor declared, “I launched a character, Hazel Motes, whose presiding passion was to rid himself of a conviction that Jesus had redeemed him.”[1]

In the opening sentence, Hazel is leaning forward: “Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat,” symbolic of his attempt to flee Jesus. At the same time, O’Connor never presented Hazel living in a creation where God is absent: “The train was racing through treetops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods.”[2] In O’Connor’s anagogical imagery, the sun functions as a visible manifestation of the living God. Standing as it does on the edge of the woods, it communicates that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Hazel finds himself in the arena of God’s judgment and his grace, even as he attempts to flee from God.

Sitting across from Haze[3] on the train is Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock. Seeing the army duffle bag at his feet and desirous of polite conversation, she says, “I guess you’re going home.” He ignores her, but she notices that there is a price tag on his suit jacket. In drawing close to see the price, she finds herself squinting instead at his pecan shell-colored eyes set in deep sockets. O’Connor then added that “the outline of a skull under his skin was plain and insistent.”[4]

Both the reference to his going home and the memento mori description of Hazel’s skull is repeated by O’Connor at the book’s conclusion. When the policemen carry Hazel into Mrs. Flood’s house and place him on the bed, she declares, “Well, Mr. Motes . . . I see that you’ve come home!” She then starts talking to him, notices that his face was composed, grabs his hand and holds it to her heart. “The outline of a skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.”[5]

An interviewer once asked O’Connor what she meant when she wrote that the creative action of the Christian life is to prepare his death in Christ, and how that belief relates to her fiction. O’Connor answered, “I’m a born Catholic and death has always been brother to my imagination. I can’t imagine a story that doesn’t properly end in it or in its foreshadowings.”[6]

It is also fair to say that O’Connor could not imagine writing a story where Jesus Christ was not pivotal.[7] The unique twist in Wise Blood is that Hazel, the protagonist, seeks to disabuse people of believing in Jesus. Two episodes on the train present Hazel’s proselytizing efforts. When Mrs. Hitchcock asks Haze again if he was going home, he responds that he was not. Given the opening she had been looking for, Mrs. Hitchcock relates that she was going to see her sister’s children, Roy, Bubber, and John Wesley. Hazel interrupts her.

“I reckon you think you been redeemed,” he said.
Mrs. Hitchcock snatched at her collar.
“I reckon you think you been redeemed,” he repeated.
She blushed. After a second she said yes, life was an inspiration and then she said she
was hungry and asked him if he didn’t want to go into the diner.[8]

The dining car was full, and the steward placed Haze with three young women who had finished eating and were smoking cigarettes. The woman across from him continually blew smoke in his direction, and Haze tells her that if she was redeemed, then he would not want to be. Another woman laughs, and Haze leans towards and says, “Do you think that I believe in Jesus? . . . Well I wouldn’t even if He existed. Even if He was on this train.” In a poisonous voice she responds, “Who said you had to?”[9]

After dinner, Haze, half-asleep lying in his curved-top berth, thinks about coffins. The first coffin he saw was that of his circuit preaching grandfather. When the grandfather was preaching from the hood of his Ford, the grandfather would point at Haze and shout that Jesus would die ten million deaths before he would let that sinful, unthinking boy lose his soul. Jesus would chase him over the waters of sin. “Jesus would have him in the end!”

Consequently, Hazel possessed the conviction that

the way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.[10]

He had wanted to stay at home in Eastrod with his two eyes open, but the army called him. The only things that Hazel took with him when he went into the army were a Bible and a pair of his mother’s spectacles, his mother being consumed with faith like his grandfather. At boot camp when others wanted him to go to a brothel, he put on his mother’s glasses and said he would not go with them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie on. They told him that he did not have a soul. Hazel wanted to believe them, that he did not have a soul. He wanted to be converted to nothing instead of to evil.

Taulkinham

After Hazel arrives in the city of Taulkinham, he sees the name Leora Watts written over a toilet with the inscription that she has the friendliest bed in town. In the taxi, the driver questions why he is going there in that “she don’t usually have no preachers for company.” Haze declares that he ain’t no preacher. The driver comments that he has a preacher’s hat and a preacher’s face, but then admits that preachers are just like everyone else. “It ain’t anybody perfect on this green earth of God’s, preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience.” Haze replies, “Listen . . . get this: I don’t believe in anything.”[11] When he leaves the cab and enters Mrs. Watts’s place, he immediately tells her that he is no preacher. She responds that that’s okay with her.

His second night in Taulkinham, Hazel walked down to see the store fronts. The sky and stars above signal that there is a God that created all things. The sky and stars also reveal that everyone’s focus in Taulkinham is elsewhere than on God.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky. The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.[12]

Hazel walks under this black sky with “his neck thrust forward as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away.” He comes upon a peeler-salesman standing over an altar made out of cardboard boxes. The salesman put a brown potato in one side of an open machine and watched the potato come out white on the back side. He cries out, “You’ll thank the day you ever stopped here . . . you’ll never forget it.” As the salesman makes his pitch, another man starts jiggling a tin cup in one hand and tapping a white cane in front of him with the other. He cries out, “Help a blind preacher. If you won’t repent, give up a nickel.” Behind him is a child handing out flyers with the words “Jesus Calls You” on the cover. This irritates the man selling the peelers. He yells, “I got these people together, how you think you can horn in?”[13]

If the peeler represents commerce that has become sanctified, then the blind man represents religion that has become commercialized. Religiously, it is the worst of all worlds. On the one hand, what can be bought and sold is held sacred and proclaimed as life changing. On the other hand, Christ and his Word are commodified and exploited in a Tetzel-like manner for profit.[14]

A young man, Enoch Emery, and then the girl handing out the flyers, seek to buy a peeler, but neither has enough money. The blind man and the girl depart, but Hazel gives the peeler-man two dollars for a box and starts running down the street after the girl. Enoch follows Hazel following the girl. When Hazel catches up, the blind man puts his hands on Hazel’s face and proclaims that some preacher left his mark on Hazel and asks if he wants it taken off or if he wants a new one put on.

But the blind man’s attention suddenly shifts as he hears the scuffling of feet of his congregation, the departing moviegoers. Haze ducks behind a step so as not to be forced to hand out the Jesus tracts. The blind man, however, grabs Haze, tells him to repent of his sins, and to distribute the tracts. Haze jerks his arm away but in doing so only brings the blind man closer. “Listen,” Haze said, “I’m as clean as you are.” “Fornication and blasphemy and what else?” the blind man said. “They ain’t nothing but words,” Haze said. “If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me.”[15]

The blind man mocks Haze, telling him that Jesus loves him, but Hazel declares that nothing matters but that Jesus does not exist. Haze then runs up the steps and starts sermonizing. “Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you think it’s because of Jesus Christ Crucified you’re wrong. I don’t say he wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you.” He then proclaims his intention. “I going to preach a new church—the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.”[16]

The crowd departs, throwaway tracts littering the ground. Haze declares, “I don’t need Jesus. . . . What do I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts.” The blind man laughs and tells Haze that his name is Asa Hawks, so that he knows who he is if he tries to follow him again.

Haze returns to Leora Watts. He takes off his clothes in the dark, which leads the narrator to recall when Haze was ten and his father took him to a carnival. Hazel’s father sent him to a tent where two monkeys danced while the father entered an exhibition that was more expensive than the others. Hazel secretly enters the tent where his father is and sees a woman in a casket who looked like a skinned animal, but then she grinned and moved.

Hazel’s guilt from the carnival is so overwhelming when he returns home that he attempts to hide from his mother’s sight behind a tree. She sees him, questions him about what he had seen, hits him across his legs with a stick, and says, “Jesus died to redeem you.” Haze mutters, “I never ast him.”[17]

The Essex

Haze’s third morning in Taulkingham is a wet, dreary day, “the sky was like a piece of thin polished silver with a dark sour-looking sun in one corner of it.”[18] He wakes with one thought in his mind, he needs to buy a car. Eventually, he finds a rat-colored Essex with large thin wheels, bulging headlights, a door tied with a rope, and a two-by-four in place of the missing back seat. As Haze drives the car out on the highway, the sky leaked over the patches of field, and Haze “had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten happened to him.”[19]

Hazel falls behind a pick-up truck moving so slowly that it seemed as if it had stopped to read the prophecy written in white on a boulder: WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP? Hazel notices the two words in smaller letters at the bottom of the sign, “Jesus Saves,” and stops the car. A truck driver stops behind him, comes to his window, and asks why he is parked in the middle of the road. “There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first. That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them.”[20] The truck driver does not care. He just wants Hazel’s car off the road.

The Church Without Christ

After an episode with Enoch, Hazel returns to the movie theater and finds the blind preacher and his daughter waiting for the crowd to disperse. The lights around the marquee are so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looks pale and insignificant. Haze parks and climbs up on the nose of his car. He points to a boy watching him and asks to which church the boy belongs. The boy, in a falsetto to hide the truth, says, “Church of Christ.”

“Church of Christ!” Haze repeated. “Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

“He’s a preacher,” one of the women said. “Let’s go.”

“Listen, you people, I’m going to take the truth with me wherever I go,” Haze called. “I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”[21]

The next morning, Hazel drives to the house he had spied the blind man and the girl entering the night before. He tells the woman at the door that he wants to rent a room. “What you do?” she asked. He said that he was a preacher. “Which church?” she asked. He said the Church Without Christ. “Protestant?” she asked suspiciously, “or something foreign?” [22] Haze reassures her that it is Protestant.

After Haze pays the three dollar rent, he knocks on the blind man’s door. Haze informs the blind man and his daughter that he has started his own church, but Asa only complains that Haze cannot let him alone. “What kind of preacher are you?” Haze mumbles, “not to see if you can save my soul?”

The blind man has the girl show Haze a newspaper clipping that read that Asa Hawks, an evangelist of the Free Church of Christ, promised to blind himself to justify his belief that Jesus had saved him. “He did it with lime,” the child says, “and there was hundreds converted. Anybody that blinded himself for justification ought to be able to save you—or even somebody of his blood.” Haze murmurs, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.” Haze departs with the clipping, and Asa tells the girl to go get it back. She smirks and replies to Asa that he has another clipping, “EVANGELIST’S NERVE FAILS.”[23]

After leaving Asa and girl, Haze drives his sputtering car immediately to the nearest garage. The mechanic tells Haze that the car can’t be fixed. Haze drives it to another garage where a man said that he could put the car in the best shape possible overnight because it was such a good car to start with.

The White Clouds

After Haze gets the car back the next day, he takes it out on the open road. Haze thinks he is alone in his car-temple, but he is not. He is in the presence of God, the sky above “just a little lighter blue than his suit, clear and even, with only one cloud in it, a large blinding white one with curls and a beard.”[24] It turns out, however, that he is not even alone in the car, as he discovers the girl hiding in the back seat. She tells him that her mother died giving birth to her on the Sabbath, which is why her name is Sabbath Lily. “Him and her wasn’t married,” she continues, “and that makes me a bastard, but I can’t help it.”[25] Haze is dumbfounded by the news about Asa, but Sabbath Lily rambles on that she’s adjusted to the modern world and asks him if he wants to neck. Since she is not entering the kingdom of heaven, she states that it does not matter what she does.

The blinding white cloud is moving away from them when Sabbath Lily suggests that Haze turn down the dirt road. The road gives them a telescoped view of the city, the white cloud now directly in front of them. Haze wants to know how her father came to believe in Jesus, but Sabbath Lily has other plans in mind. She wants him to sit under the trees with her. Haze continues to tell her about his Church Without Christ, but remembering that he left the Essex unlocked on the road, Haze hurries back to it. He finds the car dead and walks down the road, with Sabbath Lily following at a distance, to a gas station. He tells the one-armed man with slate-blue eyes there what has happened and the man drives them in a pick-up truck back to the Essex. Haze tells him about the Church Without Christ, but the man just looks under the hood. Haze asks him in an agitated voice, “It’s a good car, isn’t it?” The man says nothing but goes to work on the car. After he is finished, Haze and Sabbath Lily get in the car and the man pushes it to help get it started. After a few hundred yards, the Essex comes to life.

Haze triumphantly tells the man that “this car will get me anywhere I want to go.” He then asks the man what he owes him. “Nothing,” the man says, “not a thing.” But Hazel persists about the gas for the car the man has given them. “Nothing,” the man says with the same level look. “Not a thing.” Haze said, “All right, I thank you,” but he tells Sabbath Lily, “I don’t need no favors from him.”[26]

When Haze comes to the end of the dirt road, the man in the truck pauses so that the two are side by side looking at each other. “I told you this car would get me anywhere I wanted to go,” Haze says sourly. “Some things,” the man says, “ ’ll get some folks somewheres,” and he turns the truck up the highway. Haze drives on, but “the blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction.”[27]

Enoch

O’Connor returns the narrative at this point to Enoch, who embodies a prophecy to the folk of Taulkingham. Although Enoch knows “a whole heep” about Jesus, Enoch does not believe. Lonely, abandoned, and marginalized, he leaves it to his own wise blood to make sense of his life.[28] His religion is his daily rituals. Coming out of the movie theater, he sees Hazel preaching, standing on the nose of the rat-colored Essex. Enoch hears Hazel shouting: “If Jesus redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing about it?” Hazel continues, “What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus!”[29]

Enoch knows how to get Hazel a new jesus, but his blood reminds him not to say anything because the last time he had been with Hazel, Hazel hit him with a rock. His blood suggests that he has to get the little man under glass and let it come as a surprise to Hazel.

Endnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 164.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 9.

[3] Margaret Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor (South Carolina Press, 1997), 17. “Throughout the book, ‘Hazel’ is most often referred to as ‘Haze.’ The shortened name is a reference to a glazed, impaired way of seeing.”

[4] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 10.

[5] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 231.

[6] Rosemary M. Magee, ed. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor (University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 107.

[7] Robert Drake, Flannery O’Connor, A Critical Essay (Eerdmans, 1966), 17. Robert Drake convincingly argues that Jesus Christ is really the principal character in all of O’Connor’s fiction, whether offstage, or in the words or actions of her characters, very much onstage.

[8] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 14. Frederick Asals comments that “dialogues between characters are repeatedly at absurd cross-purposes, and Haze’s ferocious anti-Christianity is greeted with the indifference usually reserved in the modern world for orthodoxy.” Frederick Asals, The Extremity of Imagination (University of Georgia, 1982), 50.

[9] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 16.

[10] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 22.

[11] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 32.

[12] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 37.

[13] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 38–41.

[14] Steve Pinkerton, “Profaning the American Religion: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” Studies in the Novel, vol. 43, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 452.

[15] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 53.

[16] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 55.

[17] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 63.

[18] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 68.

[19] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 74. F. Asals observes that the “giant blank thing” that Haze has forgotten that has happened to him is presumably original sin. F. Asals, Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity (University of Georgia Press, 2007), 51–52.

[20] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 76.

[21] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 105.

[22] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 106.

[23] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 113.

[24] Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love (Fordham University Press, 1999), 24. O’Connor’s imagery suggests Moses and the glory cloud in Exodus 34.

[25] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 118.

[26] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 126.

[27] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 127. The chapter opens with an allusion to the glory cloud in the Exodus and ends with an allusion to the descent of the Holy Spirit at the transfiguration of Jesus. Although God’s glory seems to be fleeing Haze, it will appear again in his journey.

[28] Giannone writes that “as the meaning of Jesus cannot penetrate Enoch’s mind, the townspeople will not let Jesus affect theirs. They run the risk of becoming Enoch.” Giannone, Mystery, 19.

[29] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 140.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, November, 2025