The story begins with Hazel Motes riding in a train. During the trip he is seated opposite
Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who carries on an almost-continuous one-sided conversation in which
Haze has no interest. He keeps staring at the porter, who he thinks is from his hometown of
Eastrod, Tennessee, but the porter maintains he is from Chicago. He goes back to his berth to get
some sleep, but begins to think of his childhood in Eastrod - the deaths of his grandfather,
brothers, and mother and his desire to be a preacher like his grandfather. He had entered the army
at age eighteen and had stayed in the service for four years. During that time he had lost his faith
and concluded that he didn’t believe anything. Upon his return he had found Eastrod deserted -
all that was left in his house was an old chiffarobe, to which he had attached a sign identifying it
as his and threatening to track down and kill anyone who might steal it. He had then embarked
on this train trip, intending to go to Taulkinham. After the train leaves him at a rest stop and he
waits six hours for the next train, he finally gets to Taulkinham, where he knows no one and has
no place to stay. He finds the name and address of Leora Watts, a local prostitute, on the wall of
a public bathroom and decides to go there. It is the first time he has slept with a woman.

The next night Haze walks through the shopping district at loose ends. He comes upon a
man on the sidewalk hawking potato peelers. While he is there a blind preacher and his daughter
appear. She is passing out tracts, but Haze tears his up. She wants to buy a potato peeler but
can’t afford it. A young man named Enoch Emery is there as well, and he brags to Haze about
having a job as a guard at the zoo after only having been in town two months. Haze buys a potato
peeler, intending to give it to the girl, and follows her through town to try to catch up while
Enoch, who knows no one in town, dogs his heels and refuses to leave him alone. When they
finally catch up to the preacher, Asa Hawks, Haze gives the girl the potato peeler, but she says
she doesn’t want it. Asa tries to get Haze and Enoch to help pass out tracts, but they decline.
When they get back to Leona Watts’ house, Haze finally gets rid of Enoch, but not before the
latter tells him that the girl had given him the potato peeler, which he had also coveted but had
been unable to afford.
The next day Haze decides to buy a car so he’ll have somewhere to live besides Mrs.
Watts’ bedroom. He only has fifty dollars, so he seeks out the cheapest used car lot he can find.
After much dickering he buys an old heap with no back seat for forty dollars plus the cost of five
gallons of gas, though the owner cheats him by only filling the gas can halfway. Haze then drives
his car out into the country, where he stops at a boulder painted with the words, “WOE TO THE
BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP? JESUS
SAVES.” He looks at the sign for a few minutes and decides to visit Enoch at the zoo to get the
address of the blind preacher from him
Enoch’s daily routine at the park is, after he gets off from work, to go to the swimming
pool and hide in the bushes watching the women swim and sunbathe, then stop at the refreshment
stand and get a milkshake while flirting with the waitress, then walk through the zoo cursing and
making obscene remarks to the animals because they eat better than he does, then going to the park
museum and looking at one particular exhibit. This day, he has the feeling that he has to show
that exhibit to someone. While he is hiding in the bushes, Haze arrives. He refuses to give Haze
the address of Asa Hawks unless he follows him to the exhibit, going through the entire
intervening routine in the process. Haze reluctantly agrees, but on the way keeps saying, both to
the waitress and the owl, “I AM clean”; the exhibit turns out to be a shrunken man in a glass case. Enoch is so frightened by the exhibit that he forgets the address, so Haze throws a rock at him and
knocks him out, then disappears.

That night Haze drives around town in his car looking for the preacher and his daughter.
He finds them and sees where they live, noting that the house has a room for rent, then goes past
a movie theater where he begins to preach about his Church Without Christ to the people outside;
after the ticket-taker chases him away he goes to two more theaters. The next day he rents a room
where the Hawkses live. He intends to seduce the girl to show the blind preacher that Christ is
not real. What he doesn’t know is that the preacher is not really blind - he had promised to blind
himself to justify his redemption but had lost his nerve - and that the daughter had taken a fancy
to him and wanted to seduce him. Haze visits them and leaves a note in the girl’s hand telling her
that he wants her, then goes to find a repair shop to get his car fixed. The next day he takes his
car for a drive and is surprised to find the girl hiding in the back seat. She introduces herself as
Sabbath Lily Hawks and suggests they stop and take a walk in the fields to get to know one
another better. She tells him that her mother, to whom her father was not married, died in
childbirth, and that since an illegitimate child couldn’t go to heaven anyway, it didn’t matter
whether she was good or not. Haze, meanwhile, keeps mulling over the fact that a preacher who
was so devout as to blind himself could have had an illegitimate child. Sabbath asks him if she
could go to heaven in his church, but he’s not sure. She tries to seduce him, but he ignores her
and goes back to the car, only to find that it won’t start. A mechanic helps them get it started and
they head home.
Enoch Emery comes to believe that he will be called upon to do something special, though
he doesn’t know what; his wise blood just tells him so. He begins saving money, eating next to
nothing, and uses the money to clean up the room he is renting, get new curtains, and gild the
inside of the cabinet under his washbasin. One day after work he buys popcorn and goes into the
movie theater, where he watches three movies. When he comes out he sees Haze preaching his
Church Without Christ and hears him talk about the need for a new jesus, one who was all man
and didn’t care about redemption or dying. Enoch, remembering the shrunken man in the glass
case, thinks he knows just what to do.
Haze keeps trying to visit Hawks but can’t get into the old man’s room; he can’t understand
why any preacher wouldn’t want to try to save a lost soul like him. Instead, Hawks keeps trying
to push his daughter on him. Haze has given up trying to seduce Sabbath and instead concentrates
on protecting himself from her advances, even when she appears in his room in the middle of the
night in her nightgown. She complains to her father that nothing she tries is working, but he tells
her that she had better succeed before he leaves town or she won‘t have anywhere to stay. Haze,
meanwhile, is getting increasingly frustrated because his Church Without Christ can’t seem to
acquire any followers. A sixteen-year-old boy showed some interest, but he only wanted Haze
to take him to a brothel. Then one night a man named Onnie Jay Holy begins to pay attention to
Haze’s preaching. Suddenly he begins to testify that Haze, a true Prophet, has changed his life
with his message, and that his listeners can have their lives changed, too, for just a dollar. Haze
calls him a liar, and when he tries to climb into Haze’s car, he kicks him out. In a rage, Holy,
whose real name is Hoover Shoats, tells Haze he intends to provide some competition for him in
the future. When Haze gets home, he picks the lock on the blind preacher’s room, lights a match,
and looks into his eyes; now he knows the truth.
The next night Haze goes out to preach as usual, but in the middle of his sermon another
car like his pulls up, and out gets Hoover Shoats and another man - one dressed just like Haze. Shoats introduces him as the True Prophet, who announces that the new jesus is at hand and the
unredeemed should redeem themselves. Soon the crowd leaves Haze and moves over to Shoats
and his Prophet. Haze then drives home and finds Sabbath Hawks in his bed. She tells him that
her father ran off because Haze uncovered his scam, and that she won’t leave Haze even if he
beats her because she has no other place to go. They then make love.

That day Enoch steals the shrunken man (in reality a half-breed dwarf half-mummified)
because he thinks it is the new jesus. He hides it in his newly-gilded cabinet, but when he sticks
his head in the cabinet the odor soon makes clear to him what it is. He then decides to take it to
Haze’s apartment wrapped in some paper. On the way, he sees a crowd at a movie theater waiting
for the appearance of the gorilla who stars in the latest monster movie. Enoch wants to insult the
gorilla, but the man in the gorilla suit insults him instead. When he gets to Haze’s place, Sabbath
takes the bundle and goes to the bathroom to look at it. When she opens it she thinks it is a dead
baby - Haze’s dead baby. She cuddles it tenderly and brings it to Haze when he wakes up. He
grabs it angrily, smashes it against a wall, then throws what is left into the back yard. Haze
intends to run off without Sabbath to another town to start over where people haven’t heard of his
church before, but he feels too sick and tired to move.
Enoch now expects some reward from the new jesus. He pulls apart his landlady’s
umbrella and goes out for a walk with the pointed shaft under his arm, thinking himself very
sophisticated-looking. He goes to a diner where he borrows a newspaper and discovers that Gonzo
the gorilla is making one final appearance in town. He goes to the theater and hides in Gonzo’s
truck. When Gonzo enters and the truck drives off, he attacks the man and steals the gorilla suit.
When he falls off the truck, he buries his own clothes and puts on the gorilla suit. He goes up to
a young couple and holds out his hand, expecting that they will shake it gladly the way the crowds
did at the theater, but they run away, leaving poor Enoch very disappointed with his reward from
the new jesus.
Meanwhile, Hoover Shoats is making money out of his new church and new prophet. One
night Haze follows them and, after Shoats gets dropped off, pursues the new prophet, a man
named Solace Layfield, to a dark country road. There he rams his car, pushes it into a ditch, then
runs over Layfield. Right before the man dies, he confesses his sins (including stealing the car)
and calls on Jesus for help. Haze then leaves town, but is stopped by a patrolman on the road.
When he finds that Haze has no driver’s license, he takes his car to the edge of a cliff and pushes
it over. Haze then walks back to town and buys some quicklime, then blinds himself the way Asa
Hawks had promised to do. His landlady, Mrs. Flood, soon has Sabbath sent to a detention home
and begins to care for Haze herself. Once she steams open his government relief check and finds
out how much he gets, she raises his rent and begins to charge him for board as well. In the
process of caring for him, she discovers that he lines his shoes with rocks and pieces of broken
glass and wraps barbed wire around his chest. Knowing that she is presently getting only tow-thirds of his government check,
she schemes to get the rest. At first she intends to marry him and
have him committed, but then she decides to marry him and keep him around. She proposes this,
but when he refuses she kicks him out. He walks away during miserable weather and is found
half-dead in a ditch by two policemen. They try to bring him back to the landlady, but he refuses,
so one of the policemen hits him with his billy club, killing him. They bring him back to Mrs.
Flood, who doesn’t realize that he is dead.