n Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood," William Rodney Allen notes how the Essex functions for Hazel when he says that "The emblem of Haze's absurd motion is of course his battered Essex, his symbolic home, pulpit, and coffin" (264). Haze's ownership of the car signifies his inability to escape the legacy of his grandfather. Haze, who says he "wanted this car mostly to be a house for me" (O'Connor 37), uses his car much as his traveling preacher grandfather did his, with the Essex serving as a constant throughout his evangelical travels. Also, Haze's practice of preaching from the hood of his car comes directly from his grandfather. Thecar, which Haze says "will get me anywhere I want to go" (65), becomes not a means of escape but a symbol of entrapment, as Allen points out: . . . as fast as he runs from these terrifying memories, he repeatedly finds himself boxed in symbolic coffins: his berth on the train, the toilet stall at the station, Leora Watts's tiny room, his car. As a means of escaping his past, Haze's motion is as futile as a rat's on a treadmill, or a rat-colored car's down a highway that seems to be "slipping back under" (p. 207) its wheels. (262-63) Haze's embracing of this symbol of entrapment further shows his inner drive to return to the Christian ideology of his youth. In her essay "White Trash, Low Class, and No Class at All: Perverse Portraits of Phallic Power in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood," Linda Roher Paige gives a Freudian interpretation of the novel, asserting that, despite their low social status, the characters of Wise Blood "function as visionaries, their vehicle of achieving vision, the way of the phallus" (333). For Paige, the Essex "merges the functional and the religious, representing the embodiment of both home and temple" while exhibiting itself as "the ultimate phallic weapon" (331). Paige says that Hazel's use of the car as a bed and as amurder weapon symbolize a sexual relationship between Hazel and t...
