Wise Blood - Flannery O'Conner

In the novel, O'Connor revisits her recurring motif of a disaffected young person returning home and the theme of the struggle of the individual to understand faith on a purely individualistic basis. O'Connor's hero, Hazel Motes, sneers at communal and social experiences of Christianity, sees the followers of itinerant, Protestant preachers as fools, and sets out to deny Christ as violently as he can, he creates a counter-faith and try to draw the crowds as he proselytizes his new "Church Without Christ". Despite his refutation of faith, he is constantly identified as a preacher, even the way he dresses and the way he speaks draws a curious comparison from idle bystanders. Enoch Emery, a friend of Motes who is in search of a new Jesus, explains that some people have "wise blood": that the blood knows even if the mind does not. Hazel is obsessed with preachers, with salvation, and with denying redemption. He seeks to save people from salvation, eventually becoming an anti-priest of The Church Without Christ, where "the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the dead stay that way," and, in the end, becoming a hallowed ascetic, while around him presumed faith crumbles, hypocrisy abounds, and the fates of the meek is controlled by wild beasts.