The sixth and final story in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 master’s thesis collection, “The Train,” is a somewhat gothic tale in which nineteen-year old Hazel (Haze) Wickers suffers social awkwardness and nighttime terror during a train ride for undisclosed reasons to Taulkinham. O’Connor readers will recognize Haze, with his last name changed to Motes, as the protagonist who will reappear in the novel Wise Blood; in this short story appearance, however, Haze—like his later incarnation—proves himself to be on the run from something in his past but now finds himself agitated by his surroundings and other people.

Confronted and inexplicably annoyed by everyone else on the train—including Mrs.

The fourth story in Flannery O’Connor’s master’s thesis collection comes as no surprise in that it is somewhat typical of apprentice stories by young authors. As happens in such stories, the protagonist is a struggling writer, becoming a rather obvious projection of the story’s author.

In “The Crop,” O’Connor’s projection is forty-four year old Miss Willerton, the kind of woman people once labeled by society as a “spinster.” Willie, as she is known to her family (with whom she lives—although some critics have erroneously suggested she lives in a boardinghouse with people who are not her relatives), aspires to write stories and novels.

In the second story from Flannery O’Connor’s master’s thesis collection, which includes a total of six stories, the protagonist Rayber makes a serious mistake by arguing politics during several visits to his neighborhood barbershop. The small town college professor boasts that he will vote for candidate Darmon, an apparently integrationist liberal in the upcoming Democrat primary; others in the barbershop who champion Darmon’s more traditional southern segregationist opponent, Hawkson, deride and taunt Rayber by asking him, “You a nigger-lover?”

Rayber fails to understand or accept the attitudes of those he regards as rude and ignorant, and he remains convinced that he can either convert or enlighten his critics by offering rational, sensible argument in support of his superior position.

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Two: A Revolt Against a Menace –

When I read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, I become self-conscious.

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part One: Prologue –

First, consider this argument: The engaged reading of imaginative literature often calls upon the reader’s suspension of disbelief; at the same time, such literature demands the reader’s subjective, emotional, and participatory immersion into the text.