Rayber

The Violent Bear it Away

I read something about Tarwater drowning Bishop in a couple of O’Connor letters a while ago so I was prepared for that event.  The foreshadowing was also not lost on me. However, I did not anticipate that Rayber would try to do it first.  That turn of events is still sitting heavily somewhere in my intestines like so much indigestible food.  When we learn about Rayber’s love for his son, it becomes logical that that will have to be the place where the hammer falls.  If I anthropomorphized God, this is how I would do it.  Way to go God, burn his eyes clean!  His love for Bishop is Rayber’s Achilles heel, so he must fall now, but will he?  His reaction when he knows Bishop is dead is not of intense pain, but of numbness.  It will only be poetic justice if the numbness wears off.  Rayber could not go through with killing his son because the boy paradoxically limited the pain he could feel. Now there is the potential for unlimited excruciating pain.

O’Connor shows us what C.S. Lewis was talking about when he wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.  It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”  (C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain, New York: Macmillan, 1962, p. 93).  Will Rayber have the luxury of feeling nothing for the remainder of the novel and his life?  If nothing else, his own complicity should be his slow undoing.  He does permit the drowning.  Perhaps he even suggests it to Tarwater without exactly realizing what he is doing.  That is why it bothers me that he confesses to Tarwater.  What possible other purpose could that have had?  He is certainly not looking for absolution from this judgmental, unpriestlike, reluctant, would-be prophet.