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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Wise Blood belongs to the subgenre of Gothic fiction known as Southern Gothic. Besides being set in the South, works in this category tend to feature disturbing or eccentric characters in sinister or bleak situations, and they tend to explore themes of alienation, violence, and despair. These are all central elements in O'Connor's novel.
Works of Southern Gothic literature can often be read as reflections of the cultural collapse, economic devastation, and political challenges that marked the region following the Civil War. In relation to this, they depict the South's legacy of slavery, racism, and hostility towards the outside world. In several instances in Wise Blood, characters use racist slurs and express distrust of Black people and foreigners. Although the novel is set many decades after the Civil War and a couple of decades after the Great Depression, it still shows a South struggling to get back on its feet—without much of a desire to confront its violent past.
O'Connor combines these heavier elements with a light sense of humor, which both lightens the mood and makes the disturbing characters and events all the more disturbing. In her Author's Note to the Second Edition, written in 1962, she characterizes it as a "comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death."
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