Wise Blood recap

Hazel Motes, a young veteran raised by preachers, arrives in Taulkinham determined to prove that there is no sin, salvation, or need for Christ. He buys a failing car and founds the Church Without Christ, while the lonely Enoch Emery follows intuitions he calls wise blood. Hazel becomes entangled with the supposedly blind preacher Asa Hawks and Hawks's daughter Sabbath Lily. Promoter Hoover Shoats tries to commercialize Hazel's church and hires Solace Layfield as a duplicate preacher; Hazel kills Layfield with his car. Enoch steals a museum mummy, then later steals a gorilla costume and disappears into the identity it offers. When a patrolman destroys Hazel's car, Hazel blinds himself and turns to extreme penance. His landlady Mrs. Flood tries first to profit from him and then to keep him, but he walks into a storm, is found by police, and dies as they return him to her house.

Hazel Motes leaves the army and travels by train toward Taulkinham, dressed in a new dark suit and hat that make strangers assume he is a preacher. He insists that he does not believe in Jesus and wants no part of the vocation associated with his preacher grandfather. His family home is abandoned, leaving him no settled place to return to. In the city, bright signs, commercial entertainments, and street religion surround him. Hazel seeks out Leora Watts after seeing her address advertised and tries to make the encounter confirm his freedom from sin. Her blunt indifference frustrates his need to turn disbelief into a decisive statement. Rather than escaping religion, he arrives already organizing his life around opposition to it.

Hazel sees Asa Hawks, a street preacher who claims to have blinded himself for faith, distributing leaflets with his daughter Sabbath Lily. Hazel follows them and becomes fixated on exposing Hawks, while Sabbath takes an interested and provocative attitude toward Hazel. He also meets Enoch Emery, a lonely zoo worker who believes his inherited wise blood directs him toward important acts. Enoch eagerly tries to guide Hazel around the city and show him a small dried body kept in a museum display. Hazel rejects Enoch's attempts at friendship but continues pursuing Hawks. He begins preaching publicly from the hood of his newly purchased, unreliable Essex, declaring a Church Without Christ in which people need no redemption because there is no sin to redeem.

Hazel continues his nightly sermons, using the Essex as pulpit, transportation, and proof of independence. His denials sound increasingly like a religious mission of their own. He rents a room near Asa Hawks and watches for evidence that the preacher's blindness is false. Sabbath Lily encourages Hazel's attention while managing her own dissatisfaction with life under her father's authority. Enoch, meanwhile, feels commanded by his wise blood to remove the dried body from the museum and deliver it to the new prophet. At one of Hazel's street appearances, Hoover Shoats introduces himself under the name Onnie Jay Holy. Shoats sees a commercial opportunity in Hazel's message and proposes turning the Church Without Christ into an organized movement with paying members.

Hazel refuses Shoats's partnership and rejects the cheerful, marketable creed Shoats invents for the proposed church. When Asa disappears, Hazel discovers that the preacher can see and that his claim of self-blinding was a failed promise he has spent years evading. Sabbath moves into Hazel's room and receives the stolen museum body from Enoch, treating it as if it were an infant. Hazel reacts with fury and destroys it, refusing the symbol that Enoch imagined would complete his preaching. Shoats proceeds without him and hires Solace Layfield, dressing the man to resemble Hazel and sending him out to preach a profitable imitation of the Church Without Christ.

Hazel confronts Solace Layfield, the hired double, and runs him down with the Essex. As Layfield lies dying and voices a final appeal to Jesus, Hazel demands that he deny it, but the death leaves Hazel unable to control the meaning of what he has done. Enoch pursues a separate transformation. After seeing the costumed film attraction Gonga, he attacks the performer, steals the gorilla suit, and emerges in it to seek recognition, only to frighten away the people he approaches. Hazel drives away from Taulkinham, but a patrolman stops him and pushes the decaying Essex over an embankment. Deprived of the car he treated as his home and freedom, Hazel walks back to the city. He blinds himself with lime and begins a life of severe private penance in Mrs. Flood's boardinghouse.

Blind Hazel abandons his public church but submits himself to physical deprivation, placing stones in his shoes, winding wire against his skin, fasting, and walking without apparent destination. Mrs. Flood studies his habits while worrying about rent and imagining how she might obtain his pension. Over time, her interest shifts from simple profit toward a need to keep near the inaccessible purpose that guides him. She proposes marriage. Hazel leaves the house in a storm and is later found collapsed in a ditch by police officers. One officer strikes him while forcing him back, and Hazel dies before reaching the boardinghouse. Mrs. Flood has him put into his bed and sits beside his body. Unable to enter the inner world she has been watching, she looks into his damaged eyes and imagines a far-off light within their darkness.

After a patrolman destroys his car, Hazel returns to Taulkinham and blinds himself with lime. He gives up public preaching and adopts private acts of penance, wrapping wire around his body, walking with stones in his shoes, and eating little. Mrs. Flood, his landlady, initially worries about his unpaid rent and imagines gaining control of his government pension, but his inaccessible inner life increasingly holds her attention. She proposes marriage as a way to keep him with her. Hazel instead leaves during a storm. Police officers find him collapsed in a ditch; one strikes him while taking him back, and Hazel dies before he is returned to the boardinghouse. Mrs. Flood has his body placed in bed and sits beside him. Looking into his ruined eyes, she imagines a distant point of light, ending beside the mystery she had tried to understand and possess.