A novel far deeper than it seems (at first) : Wise Blood

I mentioned Flannery O'Connor's strangely entitled story The Artificial Nigger in yesterday's post, and now I see that the structure of that excellent story, or at least the central principle, is also a strong element in her novel "Wise Blood" - an innocent (Hazel Motes) wanders a city, basically get lost and in trouble, and (in Wise Blood) is befriended by a younger man who latches onto him and wants to, needs to show him something, a discovery he's made, that is to him inexplicable and strange. In Artificial it's the statue of a black lawn jockey. In Wise Blood is the shrunken body (perhaps a Pygmy?) encased in glass as part of an exhibit at the city zoo. I have no idea what this means, signifies, other than that O'Connor characters often confront the strangeness and grotesquery of the world and don't know what to make of it. Motes, or Haze, carries an aura of religion that's a little too powerful for his own good - his hanger-on, Enoch, believes Motes to be a preacher or a very rich man, and they are in fact linked by the blind preacher whom they both encountered on the street, that's what brought them together, and Motes stays in touch with Enoch because he thinks (incorrectly?) that Enoch can lead him to the preacher's daughter. On the surface, this is picaresque novel but on a very small scale, confined to a small patch of space - but there seem to be depths and issues and suggestions of meaning that go far beyond the scope of the story and that it will be important to examine and reveal.