Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes as Sacred Rhetorician

Hazel Motes, a peculiar character even among Flannery O'Connor's cast of eccentric characters, stands out among the rest because of his extreme introspection. Many O'Connor characters are alike in their desire to flaunt their odd but cherished attitudes and behaviors. But Hazel represents something else. He is a young man recently returned from war, yet his psychological peculiarities seem to have preceded that war. While Hazel, one may imagine, did not appear as an average soldier, he seems nevertheless not to have acquired any more scars in the war than he did anywhere else in his life. No, the "haunting" of Hazel Motes comes from something else (Seel 68), from, as O'Connor writes in the preface to the tenth-anniversary edition of Wise Blood (1949), "the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind" ("Author's" 1265). Strangely enough, this "ragged figure" seems to push Hazel toward the city, toward spectacle-filled, circus-like Taulkinham, a city where there seems to be a place for anyone and anything- anyone except Hazel, that is.