A Good Man Is Hard To Find Analysis

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“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is a Southern Gothic short story written in 1953 by Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) in a style that portrays the unfortunate demise of a family’s trip to Florida. Flannery O’Connor was raised as a Roman Catholic in the Bible Belt of the United States, which significantly influenced her purpose and style of writing towards themes of religious revelations and journeys (Flannery). This short story is a typical Foster quest story in that the family is oblivious to the fact that they are on a quest, but on their journey cut short to Florida, they learn more about themselves and others than they ever could have learned in their home-state of Georgia (Foster). Style is the manner in which an author chooses to write to their audience (“Style”). Style reveals a lot about the writer’s personality and through “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, Flannery O’Connor reveals her desire to convey God’s grace and religion in everyday life through religious symbols in characters and their actions.
The plot of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” features a family in Georgia around the mid to late 1900’s with an eccentric grandmother, the stubborn and religious protagonist, who decided that instead of going to Florida, the family was going to go to East Tennessee. Despite the grandmother’s pleas to not go to Florida after reading about the Misfit, the antagonist, who was an escaped convict, the family would not comply with the grandmother’s wishes. To compromise, Bailey, the coward son of the grandmother who was driving the car, and Bailey’s wife decided to make a detour to an abandoned house that the grandmother told the rude and obnoxious kids, John Wesley and June Star, about. The grandmother became panicked after she realized the ...

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...ly when she tries to claim him as his own, and that is why the Misfit killed the grandmother. The Misfit is “imprisoned in a web of necessity from which he cannot extricate himself…he comes to the same fate” (Renner 131). This is because of he does not observe a governing body and as a result he believes that there is not a moral order in the world.
Overall, O’Connor use of religious symbols as a literary device has conveyed the message to readers of Christianity and God’s grace. Critics have viewed her work as possessing thought-provoking and deep messages. It is clear that O’Connor attempted to accommodate readers of Christian faith and non-Christian faiths buy painting a picture in a way that most everyone could understand. Her lack of secular censoring in her work along with the vivid characters has helped give new points of view on grace, crime and religion.

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