A Good Man Is Hard To Find Theme Essay

Can the theme of good and evil actually be pure good and pure evil, or simply just a mystery? The short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’ Connor, is a rather grim and fateful story. The story is a tough, yet amazing story about a family’s unfortunate series of events on their journey to Florida. A man known as The Misfit was found escaped from the nearest prison. What could possible go wrong with an escaped convict on the loose? That’s one question the family hoped not have asked. The battle between good and evil rages on, but the question is whether the characters of good and evil are truly what they appear or simply just a blur.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is filled with tension and excitement from the beginning. The story begins with a small family deciding where to journey to on their vacation. Some say one place; others say to go to another. In the end, it was decided that they would all travel to Florida. But, unfortunately, a criminal by the name of The Misfit has escaped from the nearest penitentiary. On the car

ride, the grandmother of the family is talking about stories and past experiences in her life. She then tells the kids about a plantation she used to know about and described the house as an adventurous manor. A secret door in the house attracted the attention of the kids instantly. As they are on the road, they get into a bad accident and anxiously wait for help. Unfortunately, The Misfit himself arrives. The story says, “The

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grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. ‘You're The Misfit!’ she said. "I recognized you at once!” (Flannery 11). After being recognized, The Misfit brings the family
into the woods and has them shot while the grandmother is talking to him. He then shoots her after she calls him her son as one last action to stop the criminal using motherly love. The story ends with The Misfit showing little remorse for his actions.
Good versus evil is one theme that clearly describes, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Misfit is the evil character while the grandmother is the good, motherly, character.

However, things aren’t always as they seem. As a grandmother, she uses her calming nature to prevent the Misfit from hurting her beloved family. Unfortunately, due to his evil nature, the Misfit has the family killed by his gang of goons. As Stephan Bandy says, “The Grandmother’s role as a grace-bringer is by now a received idea, largely because the author said it is so” (Bandy 3). Bandy then says, “At her moment of extremity, the Grandmother lurches desperately from one strategy to another not quite admitting to herself that The Misfit will kill her just as casually as he has killed the rest of her family” (Bandy 5). At the end, evil pulls through and wins to take the victory. The Misfit wins and the good falls down into dismay and

death.
Often, authors write in correlation to their own personal life. Even a disease could be considered evil as The Misfit was considered evil. In the case of, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” it is about the loss of family. As the New Georgia Encyclopedia states, “When she was fifteen, O'Connor, an only child, lost her father to systemic lupus erythematosus, the disease that would eventually take her own life at age thirty-nine” (Gordon 1). Just as she had lost her father, the family loses each other and their own lives at the conclusion of the short story. The author often

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uses experiences of her own life in her works of writing. O’Connor used the disease in correlation to The Misfit in the story as a death bringer. The disease claimed the life of her father. This is similar to how the family was killed off starting with the dad. The author later died from the same illness, as had her father before her. As she attended college in Iowa, she had to have used the plantation from her experience in the land of farming. The author’s life makes a big difference in the type of short stories and written works.
The use of imagery can easily allow the reader to picture exactly what is going on in the story itself. Being able to really exist in the story is a valuable skill in the act of writing. O’Conner used imagery in her short story in many creative ways to draw in the attention of the reader and to stimulate their imagination. Another critic described the grandmother as this, “If the Grandmother is old (although she does not seem to be that old), grey-haired, and “respectable,” it follows that she must be weak, gentle, and benevolent—precisely the Grandmother’s opinion of herself and she is not shy of letting others know it” (Bandy 2). Imagery is truly a tool to entrap the visuals of a book into the head of the reader. O’Conner writes, “I don't want to equate The Misfit with the devil, I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard seed, will grow to be a grentcrow-filled tree in The Misfits' heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that's another story” (O’ Conner 2). She talks about who she thinks The Misfit is and how the grandmother uses her beliefs to try to change him. Imagery can change the way the reader can really think of the story.
Characters make up how a story is going to run. They can either be characters the reader enjoys reading about or characters the reader does not particularly like. In the short story, there is
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one family made up of many different personalities. The father, Bailey seems to be a strict, unhappy man. The mother is not mentioned very often in the story, so readers do not get the chance to meet her as much. Then, there are the children. They are full of energy and fight often.
They can be cute and playful but also be little bundles of hate and headache. The grandmother is
the most playful in the story. She entertains the kids by telling them of her past. O’ Conner says, “Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady” (O’ Conner 7). The grandmother made a flaw by recognizing one foe in the story that led to the family’s death. The grandmother isn’t completely good, though. In the story, she was dishonest, careless, and sneaky. She snuck in her pet cat before the road trip that ultimately spooked Bailey, causing the car crash. Although she is labeled as the “good,” she definitely has some tricks. However, nobody can forget the vile evil of this story. The Misfit and his band of goons that go around terrorizing everyone they meet. The evil of them can be exposed as they murder the family in cold blood while stranded. But, the question is whether he is completely evil. As the grandmother is begging for her life, he says he doesn’t want to shoot an old lady. The Misfit doesn’t want to have the family’s blood on his hands. The characters, both antagonists and protagonists make up the true good versus evil side of the short story.
In conclusion, as a family made their trek to Florida, one situation that involved escaped criminals and the tragic consequences of an accident. But, the good are not always good nor the bad masked as pure evil. They all learned that no matter where and when it all happens, the battle between good versus evil will always rage on.