Hazel’s Spiritual Quest For God:a Psychological Analysis Of Wise Blood

As one of the most important female Southern writers, Flannery O’Connor plays a very important role in American literature. O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood is regarded as a classical novel of the twentieth-century literature. Because of the absurd plot, the violent scene and the bizarre characters, Wise Blood has received a lot of attention from the readers and the critics since its first publication in1952. It tells a story about the spiritual quest of the protagonist Hazel Motes in the fictional city Taulkinham.This thesis tries to use Freud’s psychological analysis, especially the Tripartite Model of Mind, to study on Hazel’s spiritual journey of pursuing God. According to Freud, the human psyche consists of the id, the ego and the superego. The id always seeks for immediate satisfaction blindly; the ego acts as the arbitrator of the id and the external world; the superego is the moral part of human psyche, restricting and suppressing the primordial desires of the id.In Wise Blood, the protagonist Hazel grows up in a Christian family. For Hazel, his superego is the moral principles of Christianity. Due to the traumatic experiences which are brought by Hazel’s parents and the war, Hazel starts to suspect his superego and tries to deny the existence of God. With the regulation of his ego, Hazel can act in accordance with the reality principle in most cases. However, Hazel’s ego still bears the huge pressure when Hazel realizes that his hometown is abandoned and all his families are dead. The loss of Hazel’s hometown and all his family members directly leads to the dysfunction of Hazel’s superego. When Hazel’s superego is found out of function, Hazel’s id starts to predominate over his mind. As a consequence, Hazel starts to pursue the immediate pleasure and do sinful things. However, Hazel does not get any satisfaction in the process of profaning God. After experiencing a series of ridiculous events, Hazel finally realizes that only when his superego functions properly can he get himself redeemed and find his own spiritual home through converting to Christianity in a spiritually deserted world.Finally, Hazel’s superego returns, and guides Hazel to convert to Christianity. In the process of pursuing God, Hazel experiences the dysfunction and return of his superego. In the end, his superego guides Hazel to convert to Christianity and get the spiritual redemption from God through the extreme way of blinding his eyes. At last, Hazel dies without any regrets.Based on the relevant previous studies on Wise Blood, this thesis tries to analyze Wise Blood from the perspective of psychoanalysis so as to let the readers get a better understanding of the whole novel. This thesis explores Hazel’s inner world within the framework of Freud’s psychoanalysis. It mainly focuses on the formation, the dysfunction and the return of Hazel’s superego. This thesis argues that only when Hazel’s superego functions properly can he get himself redeemed through converting to God in a spiritually deserted world.