A Good Man Is Hard To Find Rhetorical Analysis

Everyone is faced with decisions and choices in life, and sometimes they are combined with impelling and inevitable consequences. Flannery O'Connor’s religiously symbolic short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" portrays a family of unappreciative adults and children traveling to Florida for a vacation. While traveling the family has an unfortunate accident and encounter a wanted and deadly criminal named The Misfit. As they are forced to face their own destruction, the grandmother attempts to find some mercy in the misfit to prevent her own death and subsequent Judgment. O’Conner in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, skillfully uses noticeable foreshadowing, elaborate symbolism, and dramatic irony to portray the message that people sometimes experience

salvation and redemption at the most unexpected times.
O'Connor's expertise in foreshadowing the future events of the story is fascinating. For example, there are three noticeable occurrences that this skill is utilized. First, in the beginning of the story the grandmother sharply dresses in her nicest clothing. As the family sets out, the grandmother puts on her public face, "the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet” (423). If one is perceptive of the story, the grandmother's sophisticated attire indicates a foreshadowing of her future demise. Secondly, the family discovers that The Misfit has just escaped from a Florida prison. The Grandmother, who is one never to shy away from asserting her opinion, addresses the discovery by reminding the family of the dangers they could encounter on their impending trip. With the knowledge of a dangerous criminal running around loose in Florida, precisely the same place the family is traveling, allows one to conceive the idea of an eventual encounter with the criminal. Thirdly, as the family is traveling they pass by a graveyard with five or six graves in a confined space. If one is insightful, it is not a coincidence that the number of graves is equal to the actual number of individuals in the car. To clarify, even though there are five individuals and a small child in the car, it is observable that a small child is not a grown adult. So, skillfully the author places the number of graves in the story at five or six.
Furthermore, O’Connor uses elaborate symbolism to describe her characters. For example, the appropriately named character The Misfit serves as a symbol of wicked as well as a symbol of the criminal’s failure to fit into civilization. The Misfit and his accomplices serve as the personification of evil and one could even compare them to the devil, but the misfit seems more humanistic and perplexed than that. For instance, the misfit is disturbed by the evil in the world even though he is an active participant. The narrator indicates that he is another pained soul on earth that lacks spirituality. Additionally, the family also symbolizes an assemblage of misfits as shown through their selfish behavior and lack of concern for other's emotions. For example, the mother neglects her children except for her baby; the children have no remorse about littering and giving snappy feedback to the adults. Furthermore, the narrator mentions a cloudless and sunless sky many times after the family has the car accident, and the misfit specifically mentions it immediately after he is introduced in the story. Likewise, the symbolic sky is mentioned after the grandmother meets her demise, "her face smiling up at the cloudless sky" (433). The narrator cleverly never reveals if it is night or day in the story, and when the mysterious sky is displayed for the last time glowing on the grandmother's smiling face, the reflection of the cloudless sky seems to reshape, indicating that the grandmother found peace in her last few moments.
The irony the author illustrates plays a very important role in understanding the subliminal messages in the story.

In several different scenarios, the grandmother is shown as manipulative, snobbish, and slightly senile and judges based on appearance. For example, when the family meets Red Sam at the gas station, he mentions his tendency to allow complete strangers to charge gas, and he is curious why he would allow strangers like the grandmother to do so, and the grandmother replies, "Because you're a good man" (427). The grandmother makes this determination with a very small amount of knowledge of who Red Sam is, and without any information or significant insight about him as a person. Additionally, after the accident happens and the misfit makes his first appearance, the grandmother immediately notices his ability to put the family at ease with genuine kindness. This evaluation by the grandmother motivates her to compliment the dangerous criminal, and she even goes as far to call him a good man. While it is likely she is just attempting to earn approval with the misfit, it is still another example of the grandmother making shallow generalizations based on outward appearances and behavior without knowing the person. Furthermore, irony is strategically placed in the story when the grandmother encounters the misfit and calls out to him that he was her baby, indicating that she saw herself mirrored in the demeanor of the misfit. Consequently, the misfit mentions that she would have been a good woman, “If there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”

(433).