SOURCE: “The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O'Connor's Wise-Blood,” in American Literature, Vol. 58, No. 2, May, 1986, pp. 256-70.

In the following essay, Allen discusses Flannery O'Connor's use of animal imagery to depict her notion of the world as a zoo of misfits in her novel Wise Blood.

In Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, Frederick Asals observes that Wise Blood “seems to have become the whipping-boy of the O'Connor canon, a mass of faults that reveals the greater expertise of The Violent Bear It Away or the superiority of the stories to both novels.”¹ Objections to Wise Blood go as far back as the letter one man wrote to O'Connor demanding to know “what happened to the guy in the ape suit.”² Subsequent complaints about the novel have also centered on Enoch Emery—in particular on the supposed disconnectedness of his subplot from the structure...