Turning Away From Violence/ Bishop the Martyr

I find it interesting that in the final sections of TVBIA, O'Connor studiously avoids showing Bishop's death. The reader is given the moments leading up to Tarwater's actually immersing the boy, and Rayber's perspective of hearing the death, but no direct description of the moment. This is interesting to me because, in so much of her work, O'Connor often rubs the reader's nose in horror, in moments of unspeakable violence and hate. Why the reticence here? Perhaps it is because the death resonates more powerfully as a symbolic moment, rather than a heinous crime, when the reader is given only fragments of detail and allowed to piece together the event for his/herself. Another instance of this turning away from the horrible is Tarwater's rape towards the end. Once again, the reader only receives hints and insinuations, the moments before and after but not the moment itself. Perhaps it would be too sensationalistic/exploitative of O'Connor to have reveled in the details of these violent acts, I tend to think so. There is enough direct violence in this story (the description of Bishop's first drowning), so that any more might have been in bad taste and would have diminished the intellectual/spiritual power of this story.

Another thing I find interesting is the positing of Bishop as a christian martyr, perhaps analogous to Christ. Like Christ, Bishop's father sends him willingly into the hands of his executioner(s) and does nothing to prevent his death. And, like Christ, the end of TVBIA seems to indicate that Bishop's only purpose in life was to die, that his life, though lived in tenderness towards those that showed him none, was the life of a lamb whose death feeds the living. Bishop dies so that Tarwater and Rayber can live. They are no longer bound to this boy (Rayber from his burning love and Tarwater from his impulse to Baptise) and are set free from one another. That Bishop's life was no more than a symbol is shown by the ease with which Rayber and Tarwater accept his death; neither think of him as a real human being, whose murder is a horrible act of brutality, rather they only see his death as it affects themselves. His death literally sets the world aflame, burning the eyes of his murderers and driving their lives towards destiny.