Elizabeth Hanna Hanson “Backwards to Bethlehem”: In this paper, I argue that, rather than presenting readers with a challenge to read the final chapter of Wise Blood as indicative either of Hazel Motes' conversion or of his complete surrender to nihilism, the profound ambiguity of O'Connor's ending is itself productive of meaning. The undecidability surrounding the possibility of Haze’s conversion places O’Connor within the tradition of the religious writer as a practitioner of an indirect method of communication as articulated by Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, this indirect method entails forcing the reader to confront the question of the religious without proposing an answer. Significantly, Wise Blood’s concluding shift of focalization, from Haze to Mrs. Flood, echoes a similar shift in Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, both structurally and thematically. Both texts’ deployment of this strategy is exemplary of Kierkegaard’s indirect method. The indeterminacy of O’Connor’s ending also honors the unfinalizability, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, of Haze’s character—that is, his continued potentiality as a character and his resistance to reductive summation by a narrator. This unfinalizability extends to Mrs. Flood and the implied reader as well (who are united by the final chapter’s abrupt change in focalization from Haze to Mrs. Flood) and allows for the foregrounding of the religious question in a manner compatible both with O’Connor’s concerns as a religious artist and with the calculated restraint of Kierkegaard’s indirect method of communication. Tracing the striking similarities in technique between these two authors will enrich our understanding of the Christian literary and intellectual tradition in which they participated.
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