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CHARACTER essay A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND by Flannery O’Connor
Character analysis on a good man is hard to find by flannery o'connor
Literary analysis on flannery o'connor
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The perception of religion is different for everyone and for the grandmother in the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, being a lady with good Christian values was how she defined herself. The grandmother’s innocence of the evil existing in the world cost her and her family their lives. The story “Cathedral” however, has a more positive outlook on faith. The narrator, “Bub”guided by a blind man named Robert was able to visualize and draw a picture of a cathedral, without really knowing what one was. This essay will examine how the outcomes of both stories were affected by the beliefs of those involved.
The grandmother’s views good/bad was based on how she was raised. Her family was good because they were white, attended church and believed in Jesus Christ. Understanding the true concept of Christianity is another story. During her final moments of life, this grandmother had doubts about her faith (O’Connor 1203).
What put this family into the clutches of the Misfit when they should have been heading to Florida? It was another case of the grandmother getting her own way. Bailey had no intention of stopping anywhere, but a story about an old plantation got the older children begging to see it, so he turned back just to shut everyone up. Pitty Sing, the grandmother’s cat jumped up on Bailey’s neck as he was driving down the dirt road, causing their car to roll into a ditch. (1196-1197). As luck would have it, the Misfit and his two buddies were right in the area.
After watching her family being led into the woods and hearing gunshots, the desperate grandmother tried to save herself. She called upon Jesus and tried to use every trick she could think of, including telling the Misfit, “You’ve got good b...
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...his is a defining moment for Bub; he realized that Robert helped him see how blind he had been to the blessings in his life up to this point.
Bub was amazed at the image he and Robert created. Bub was convinced that he knew nothing about cathedrals or art, and he had just learned differently (575). Bub had been shown that all is not as it appears in life. Roberts’s faith in Bub had made him accomplish something he never even imagined.
Both stories show the power of faith. Robert had faith that Bub could demonstrate a cathedral for him and so it happened. The Misfit was able to murder a family because of his belief in his own persecution, which justified his actions. Faith is the conviction of a person’s ideals. These ideals can sometimes accomplish wonderful things like the cathedral drawing or a horrible event like the murder of an entire family.
The significance of the final scene in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is important because illustrates how people with a negative demeanor can develop into a person with a positive attitude towards others. In the story, Bub not only falsely assumes bad things about blind people, but also about others as well. For example, he assumes that Roberts wife is a “negro” woman because her name was Beulah. The things that Bub assumes about Robert and Beulah resemble Bub’s negative attitude and personality toward the blind man and Beulah. Towards the end of the story, as Bub and Robert were watching television, the show featured a particular Cathedral. Robert asked Bub to describe the Cathedral when Robert says, “I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you
He constantly complains that “a blind man in my house was not something [he looked] forward to” (362). The close friendship between the narrator’s wife and Robert provokes his insecurities. This friendship has lasted for ten years and during those years, they have exchanged countless tapes regarding experiences they have gone through. Because of this, her husband feels “she [has] told him everything or it seems” (363) about their relationship. Upon the arrival of his wife’s friend, the husband is ultimately uncomfortable around Robert because he does not know how to communicate with or act around him.
Bub’s misconceptions are now completely flipped as Robert is helping Bub with something Bub does not understand at all. It is as if Bub is the incapable one and Robert is his guide. By the time Bub and Robert are holding hands and drawing a picture together, Bub has released all his previous misconceptions and some of his insecurities. This is when Bub really begins to see the side of Robert that perhaps is why his wife loves him so much.
...interracial relationships. However because of the way he acts when he hears about the two of them, it is obvious that he has led a sheltered life. But even after his entire life of not understanding what was going on in the world around him, one night with Robert enlightened him and changed his view on people and his surrounding environment.
The grandmother serves as a symbol of etiquette and structure: dressing as a lady with her neckline “pinned [with] a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet” (O’Connor) and constantly reminding her grandkids of the wonderful gift of nature and the necessary appreciation for their belongings, keeping the children from throwing their sandwich wrappers out the car window and bickering, and attempting to improve their manners. She believes in herself to be a good, Christian woman. On the contrary, the grandmother is, as T. W. Hendricks observes in his literary criticism, Flannery O’Connor’s “spoiled prophet”, “compromised by her delusions about her background and social status” and a partaker in sinful pride. She is pretentious and domineering towards her son, as well as, his wife and children. She seems to believe her opinions, on more than just religion, are factual.
Bub felt and understand the meaning of cathedral after being in Robert's position.and that pushes him to understand allots of things around him,because he now knows what it means to too feel something rather than just visualizing it. and he admit it by saying “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.” because now he feel what is inside of hime self not what is around him.
...ns up to new possibilities: "Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you bub? Well, it's a strange life, we all know that"(P729). This quote shows the narrators limited view on life. By drawing the cathedral with Robert, the narrator's views are expanded and he experiences a revelation. The narrator realizes that he must let go of his insecurity and mental acts of jealousy.
In Flannery O’Conners, A Good Man is Hard to Find, the use of allusions convey the theme of death. While they were all driving through Georgia, the grandmother noticed this landscape. “They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island.” (132) The six graves emphasize the theme of death. In Baileys family, there are six members. This highlights the fact that they are going to die later on. Additionally, the island too, represents death and isolation. Towards the ending of this short story the family members are surrounded by the men and the misfit. This can allude to how an island is fenced (just like how the graves were fenced) by a body of water. Moreover, in this short story,
Faith is something a person must have inside them to be able to succeed. Success and failure are two completely different things, but faith is what separates the two. In the short story “A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets” by Kevin Brockmeier, the author illustrates the struggles a man must overcome in society and the obstacles he must overcome when his faith is tested to the limit. In the fable, the author uses symbols of faith, magical elements, and realistic struggles to divulge the morals and struggles of life.
In Raymond Carver’s story “Cathedral” the narrator learns what it means to “see” through someone who cannot. To see is to be able to view the things around us while putting aside preconceived notions or fear about these objects or people. In order for this to occur once must overcome what they feel is out of the ordinary and learn to accept things as they are. At first the narrator is doesn’t accept the man and uncomfortable around Robert. The narrator soon comes to understand this when he puts aside his fears, and judgments that he can see more than what meets the eye, and the freedom that comes along with this seeing.
Not long after being on the dirt road the grandmother recalls a “…horrible thought…” that sent shock waves through her feet scaring “… Pity Sing the cat [, and causing it to] spr[ing] onto Baileys shoulder”(O’connor.428). Bailey not long after loses control of the car and crashes them into a ditch flipping the car a couple times. The author noting that “The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee”(O’connor.428). The authors insight on the grandmother allows the reader to fully understand the grandmothers selfishness and inability to admit she was ever wrong in anything she did. It is not long after the foreshadowing catches up to the helpless family stranded in the midst of nowhere as a strange car slowly approaches them with three men in it. The grandmothers outspokenness is once again continued as she made it vocally known that she recognizes the misfit as one of the men. It is at that moment the misfit says “…it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn 't of reckernized me”(O’connor.429). The reader can conclude the fate of the family at this point and lay blame everything that has happened on the grandmother. Soon after killing the rest of her family the grandmothers social order begins to vividly and rapidly change as she tells the misfit to “pray” and even tells him “…you’re one of my babies. You 're one of my own children”(O’connor.432-433). The reader can now see the grandmothers transformation as she lives the last couple minutes of her life she talks about Jesus, and even considering the misfit to be a “…good man at heart”(O’connor.430). Not long after the grand mother is shot through her chest several times and is carried into the woods and placed next to the rest of her
The unnamed narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” poses as an unreliable narrator for his unaccepting nature towards blind people along with his ignorant perception of many realities in his life that Carver presents for the reader to take into question. The narrator holds prejudice against Robert, a blind man whom the narrator’s wife worked with ten years earlier and eventually befriends. Unperceptive to many of the actualities in his own life, the narrator paints an inaccurate picture of Robert that he will soon find to be far from the truth.
In the end, before her death, the grandmother realizes that the only real “Good Man” who was so hard to find, is Jesus. It is possible to find Him, but it took a faith journey that nobody expected to take, including herself. She had to dump all of her manipulative, self-absorbed manners, as well as her focus on class and external showings of her Christian beliefs. In exchange for all of her worldly effects, she received the grace that she had been searching for her whole life. In the end, the grandmother received her Grace and went on to Paradise.
In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the reader is let into two different worlds that take place in two completely different eras. Brave New World takes place 500 years in the future and is about a dystopian future. It shows how people are separated into different caste systems and are conditioned into how they should act. A Good Man is Hard to Find takes place in the 1930’s and is mainly about the goodness that an individual has. In both texts, the authors use of society and class, religion, and the contrasting ideas of freedom and manipulation help further the idea of how a class system can have the same meaning no matter what era.
When her outward attempts fail, the grandmother turns inward to her knowledge of Christ in a last ditch effort to save her life. Suddenly, the grandmother and The Misfit move into an intellectual conversation about Christ. At its climax, The Misfit becomes emotional, “‘Listen lady,’ he said in a high voice, ‘if I had of been there I would of know’…his voice seemed about to crack” (21). Their discussion stops at this point, and finally reaches the core of O’Connor’s moral code. Merely knowing about Christ does not equate with salvation; it requires a true connection to God. In this moment, everything has been stripped away from the grandmother’s life, and she is able, for the first time, to find her relationship with God. “The grandmother’s