In his half-sleep he thought where he was lying was like a coffin. The first coffin he had seen with someone in it was his grandfather's. They had left it propped open with a stick of kindling the night it had sat in the house with the old man in it, and Haze had watched from a distance, thinking: he ain't going to let them shut it on him; when the time comes, his elbow is going to shoot into the crack. His grandfather had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger. When it was time to bury him, they shut the top of his box down and he didn't make a move.

Haze had had two younger brothers; one died in infancy and was put in a small box. The other fell in front of a mowing machine when he was seven. His box was about half the size of an ordinary one, and when they shut it, Haze ran and opened it up again. They said it was because he was heartbroken to part with his brother, but it was not; it was because he had thought, what if he had been in it and they had shut it on him. (Chapter 1)

Basic set up:

Hazel Motes, the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, is a World War II vet returning home on a train to Tennessee. Here he's thinking that the train he's on reminds him of a coffin.

This passage comes early in the novel, but there's already a boatload of decay and death for Haze to contend with. Hey, the guy has just returned from World War II, so can we blame him?

Haze's feeling of being in a coffin leads him to think about family members—like his grandfather and his brothers—he has seen in coffins. The imagery of death and coffins in this first chapter of the novel is important: it's signaling to us that decay and death are Haze's obsessions, and as we read on, we'll see decay everywhere in the novel.

Man, there's a lot of death and decay in this passage. Within the span of two paragraphs, we've got no fewer than four coffins: the one that Haze imagines he's in, the one he saw his grandfather in, and the two coffins of his brothers. Talk about grim.

The obsession with death and decay in the imagery is contrasted with the language of the passage, which is pretty simple and matter of fact. Decay is just a part of life in this novel, so it's spoken about in a matter-of-fact way.