The Doubles Motif in Flannery O’Connors The Violent Bear It Away :: Violent Bear It Away Essays

The Doubles subject in Flannery OConnors The unfounded Bear It A port In The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery OConnor makes use of the doubles motif. The doubles motif occurs when one character looks at some other character and sees or senses yet a nonher characters presence. In this novel, Francis and Rayber not plainly serve as doubles for each other only if also as a double for mason. Francis makes mason Tarwaters presence felt by the way he talks and the fact that he, like stonemason, never removes his cap. After Francis is with Rayber a few days, Rayber feels stonemasons presence. Rayber had never, even when Old Tarwater had lived under his roof, been so conscious of the old mans presence (189). Mason employ baptism to gain control of Francis and to have him carry out his mission afterward his death. Using baptism to extend his boundaries of self like a wall round Young Tarwater, Mason simultaneously performs an act of regeneration and murder to be repeated l ater when Francis baptizes/murders Bishop. Francis then becomes Masons immortal self. Francis provides Mason with a sense of existing, but he can only weather the boy as a double, not as an independent gracious being (Paulson 102). Mason clings to the opinion of being a prophet and Francis clings to the idea of being born in a wreck, with no father, an orphan, because this makes him unique, gaining epic proportions in order to transcend the anonymous crowd (Paulson 106). Francis denies the father the way that Mason and Rayber deny the mother. Rayber tries, as Mason does, to implant his ideas within Francis. Both Rayber and Mason direct the explosive force of their actions toward Francis, being lost themselves. Their struggle to give out decimates their nephew (Paulson 106). Rayber condemned the violent act that Mason committed, taking Francis and Rayber both away from reality, but Rayber committed the violent act of trying to drown his own son. Rayber and Mason both use Franc is and Bishop as a way to keep the solitariness away. OConnor, though, draws a parallel between them by making both men evangelical zealots (Paulson 102). Rayber is skeptical of religion and Mason has a unearthly fervor. Rayber and Mason both try to teach Francis but they do not want to teach him the same things. It soon becomes clear that not only Raybers efforts at reconstruction but also Masons muddied baptismal waters threaten the freedom of Francis, who weakly perceives the disturb prophet within them both (Paulman 103).