Why do people think they can hide in Wise Blood? Asa has a secret. Sabbath has a secret. Even Enoch has a secret (though he doesn’t really try to hide it). For that matter, no one really tries to hide their secret. I don’t want to take the easy approach and say that O’Connor made her characters have secrets that could not be hidden to show our inability to keep secrets from God. I think that they have secrets because they want to hold onto something that will impress someone who does not know them.
Asa keeps his fake blindness to himself until he realizes that no one cares about the sad blind preacher. What does that say about people? Does it say that we care about people and are interested in what they have to say until we decide that they can’t do anything for us? Asa had some sort of magical power over Haze until Haze found out that he was not blind. After that, Asa gave up on his preaching and turned to a life of begging on the street sans Sabbath. By the way, why does he give her up so easily? I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s not really his daughter, but that’s another story.
Sabbath’s “secret” that she is a “bastard” has a pretty major impact on Haze. He wanted to believe that Asa was a good preacher, but that attitude changed when he found out that Asa could not live up to his expectations of perfection. I don’t think that Sabbath tells her secret to too many people, but she probably told Haze to impress him. It didn’t really work because he was still pretty disgusted by her need to be a sex-crazed girl, and I can’t really say as I blame him. But, back to the secret thing, her secret is not one that remains hidden.
Enoch has a few secrets that are pretty ridiculous. He “hides” from the woman who bathes and he “hides” the shrunken man, but he doesn’t care if he gets caught. The woman knew that he was spying on her, and I think that she liked it because she wanted to be looked at. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone to the pool every day. I want to know why he was so impressed by the shrunken man. Maybe it was because it looked like something from another world. Foreign things impress most people, but Haze proves that everything can be destroyed. Maybe that is the purpose of the story. No matter how sturdy something seems (faith, shrunken men, relationships, and even people) everything can go away with the decision of one person. Nothing, not even a secret, can remain forever.