A Good Man Is Hard To Find Theme Analysis

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When you are put in a life or death situation you will do anything to survive. In some cases you end up doing all the wrong things and sealing the fate of your family. The short story “A Good Man is hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Conner is a great example of this. The grandmother sealed the fate of herself and her family. I believe there are many themes demonstrated throughout the story like manipulation when the grandmother tells lies to get what she wants, selfishness because she does not care who she hurts, and religion because she tells the man to pray and look to Jesus.
To start off, one of the themes that I recognized through the story is manipulation. The grandma tries to manipulate her family to go to East Tennessee rather than Florida …show more content…

The grandma was a very selfish person throughout the whole story. Some examples of this is when the grandma wanted to visit the plantation and the rest of the family did not, but she made up a lie about the house “not telling the truth but wishing that she were” (O’Connor, Pg. 4) which made the children want to go even though she knew that once they arrived and there was not a hidden passage that they would be very mad but she only cared about what she wanted. On the way to the plantation the grandma comes to realize that she has made a mistake and that the house was not down the road they were traveling, but instead of telling the family, she decided to keep her mouth shut for the first time in the story and not say a word to anybody “the thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up” (O’Connor, Pg. 5). When The Misfit comes over to the car to talk to them the grandma recognized him from the newspaper article that she read that morning. She thought it would be a good idea to call him out on it without thinking of the consequences that could come from it. Due to that decision her whole family, including herself ended up being killed. If she would have just kept her mouth shut would they have survived? When The Misfit began killing her family the grandmother was saying whatever she could to try to save her own life, but not the rest of her family’s life. “You wouldn’t shot a lady, would you?” (O’Connor, Pg. 6). She only cared about herself surviving. “I will give you all the money I got” (O’Connor, Pg. 8)The Grandma ended up sealing the fate of herself and her family because she only thought about herself and did not know when to keep quiet and when she should speak

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