Francis Tarwater is a teenage boy who has been raised in near-isolation by his great uncle Mason Tarwater somewhere in deepest backwaters of the American South. The elder Tarwater has been preparing the boy to be a prophet of God, in the line of Old Testament prophets like Jonah, Daniel, and Elijah, but Tarwater reacts to his great-uncles death by first getting drunk, and second by burning down their old farmhouse, called Powderhead, with, as far as he knows, old Tarwater's body still inside, unburied, in defiance of the old man’s most consistent demand – that the boy bury him in proper, Christian fashion. After starting the fire, Tarwater flees Powderhead for the big city, there to confront his only other living relative, his uncle Rayber, an academic who has empathically rejected Old Tarwater, his beliefs, and his way of life.

Today, in the first of a four episode series, we are discussing the first half of the first section of Flannery O’Connor’s second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away. The strange and bleak landscape of the novel asks us many unpleasant. Has God withdrawn from the created World? If so, why? What kind of people are driven or called to be prophets in such a world? What does O’Connor mean by violence? Is there such a thing as sacred violence? Finally, and perhaps most unpleasant of all, Can we ever hope for grace in a world where the voice of God has become so distant and the light of the sun so dim?