These are not normal characters by any stretch: Wise Blood

Rereading or at least reviewing "Wise Blood" in prep for (tonight's) book-group meeting, and on 2nd go-through the religious themes and elements more starkly rise and more deeply imbue the narrative. Grad students could have and no doubt have had a field day tracing religious symbols. Tombs and burials - Hazel going to sleep in the train like being in tomb, he watched his father's and grandfather's and (later we learn) mother's burial and always wondered if they'd open the casket, afraid of burial alive, but he's too literal, does not understand in religious sense what it is to rise from the dad; the name: Moats (the mote in my eye?), and then the blinding, as in Paul struck down blind on the road to Damascus, but he's blinded on road to nowhere. He does not know his destination, but it's important to him to have what he thinks is a good car. The one-armed man tells him the car is not the way to his destination. The animal theme - the work in the zoo, the bear and hawk in the cage. False idols. Watching the women at the pool, like bathing women at beersheba? Hazel's insistence that the porter is from his home town - he cannot accept someone's making a new life for himself. Or is it that the porter denies his name, just as Peter denied Jesus' name? Most of all, Hazel obsessed with his preaching against Christ, and why is that? These are not normal characters by any stretch, and something must have happened to each of them to turn them against Christ, but O'Connor has no interest at all in exploring or explaining that - the wartime trauma, childhood trauma, what is it that spurs Hazel first to preach against the church and then to repent and mortify his flesh?