For one thing, I'm so off on my blogs! Sorry...

And another thing, I've thought longest about whether The Violent Bear It Away is a bildungsroman than most of the other novels. I've concluded it is, though it is vastly different than all of the others. The grotesqueness of the story forces readers to look beyond the surface level to see whether young Tarwater comes of age. Though I don't like the thing he becomes or the way he becomes it, he has changed remarkably. Because he returns to where the story begins, it could seem as though he has gone full circle. However, his return marks a change because he left not able to stand the place and with the desire to run far away from the things he experienced there. He thought he could go to Rayber, but then he was haunted by Old Tarwater all the more and strained by Rayber's efforts to change him. Though now more mentally ill than before, he has discovered that for him, he has no other place to go, no other thing to become than the prophet his great-uncle foretold. It is perhaps for the reader's benefit that the story stops where it is, for what Francis will become is frightening. On the other hand, maybe it would have been better for O'Connor to tell us: Our imaginations can only go to the extreme worst with the framework given.