Hazel’s broken-down car, purchased for forty dollars, is an important symbol in the novel. On the one hand, it represents home, a place that Hazel can call his own—when he is most frustrated by those around him, he always attempts to escape to his car.

Hazel is preaching with such concentration that he doesn’t notice a rat-colored car pulling up across the street. He doesn’t see Hoover Shoats and a man dressed exactly like Hazel emerge and climb up on the nose of their car.

Hazel insults Solace’s car, which exactly resembles his own, and Solace echoes the obviously false response that Hazel has given many times: it’s a good car. Blind to his own faults, Hazel sees them all too clearly when they are embodied by Solace. Hazel tells him to take off the hat.

Slade is the used-car salesman who sells Hazel his "rat-colored" car. The sullen boy works at the used car lot where Hazel Motes buys a jalopy for $40. The taxi driver takes Hazel from the train station to Mrs. Leora Watts's house.

When he sees "a high rat-colored machine" with one door tied shut with a rope, Hazel knows that's the car he wants. The owner Slade approaches and offers to sell the car for $75. After Hazel and Slade haggle, Hazel buys the car, an Essex, for $40.

Flannery O'Connor explains elsewhere that Hazel's "rat colored automobile is his pulpit and his coffin as well as something he thinks of as his means of escape. He is mistaken in thinking that it is a means of escape, of course, and does not really escape his predicament until the car is destroyed by the patrolman."

For the same reason, Hazel buys a car, an ancient, rat-colored Essex. His claim that a man with a good car has no need of salvation is a sort of parody of all the slogans of the secular world.

In her 1952 novel Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor presents Hazel Motes's Essex automobile as a symbol for Hazel himself. The car's dilapidated state corresponds to Motes's own spiritual decay; however, the initial quality of the car's workmanship corresponds to Hazel's Christian upbringing, which he cannot deny in spite of himself.

Aug 31, 2022 · Throughout O’Connor’s violent tale Hazel Motes is obsessed with the “rat colored car” he has just purchased. Despite the fact that it is a fifty-dollar junkyard heap that keeps breaking down, Hazel Motes is assured that it is a fine car that will take him anywhere.

Motes is preaching with such fervor and concentration that he does not notice a high, rat-colored car which has cruised twice around the block and the two men inside are looking for a place...