Nicolet eventually finds Rooney, who has cloistered herself away in a retreat house in Muscadine, owned and operated by Lillian Flagg, a faith-healer and Christian mystic.

Flagg's overtures to Nicolet on the topics of prayer and forgiveness prove to be a catalyst for change in the young minister's outlook, prompting a greater understanding about the inherent joy that lies beneath grief and suffering.

Her unguarded conversation with Poteat unwittingly opens the door for the newspaper man to spread the rumours regarding her employer's supposed affair among his parishioners – an outcome over which she has very little control and yet feels a great sense of culpability.

Her life reaches its terrible conclusion in the novel as, wracked by uncontrollable guilt, she falls victim to a misfiring prank perpetrated by some boys who attend Nicolet's church.

Critic Dale Brown suggests that Buechner simultaneously expresses ‘a belief that the world is a dark place’, while also finding ‘beyond human inadequacy […] faith, grace, and absurd joy’.

[4] He further argues that the novel is ‘a studied attempt to suggest the presence of grace in a tawdry world’, and manifests the desire of its author ‘to jar readers and listeners into a consideration of spiritual possibilities’.

[11] Julian Moynahan, in his review published in Book Week, concluded that ‘The Final Beast lodges itself at midpoint between the priest’s and the writer’s way of looking at things’.

[12] In an article written for The Spectator, John Davenport argued that the theological centre of the novel is located largely in its common worldview; ‘Mr.

The latter wrote in the New York Times that the novel evoked ‘the beauty and laughter underlying the filth and boredom of this world’,[16] to which the former, in a review published in Harper’s, added the final word that:This is a story that skates with daring skill and exuberant speed over the thin ice of potential blasphemy, sentimentality, and violence to emerge finally on the firm, smooth surface of honest faith and uproarious laughter.