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.

More than half a century has passed since Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), intrigued readers and baffled most critics. O’Connor, in her brief life (1925-1964), went on to publish another novel (The Violent Bear It Away, 1960) and a collection of short stories (A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955).

According to statistics and projections available from the United States’ Social Security Administration (an organization with a big stake in accurate predictions about longevity), I can look forward to 20.28 more years (and 243.36 monthly supplemental retirement payments) before reaching the end of the road.

I have been pondering this question: What movies stand out as good versions of good books or short stories?

The answer to this question, of course, becomes subjective for more than a few reasons, but one reason stands out: an individual’s definition of the qualifier (good) complicates the question.

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Thirteen: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All (Continued) –

(Note: Previously posted installments of this series have included bibliographies in the form of endnotes for the text’s parenthetical citations; however, hence forth, the bibliographies will be omitted (to save space and time) but are nevertheless available to any reader who requests the complete bibliography for this series.)

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Within Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her fascination with death seems to metastasize exponentially from the infrequently mentioned cells isolated in her personal experience.

Jennifer H.