Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find
"A Good Man is Hard to Find presents a masterful portrait of a woman who creates a self and a world through language." At least that is what Mary Jane Shenck thinks of the Flannery O'Connor story. Several different people have several different views of this controversial and climatic work of O'Connor's. In this paper I will take a look at these different views of different situations and characters in this book.
First we will take a look at grandmother. She is made to look like the saint in this story. Her, in contrast to the rest, is the good person, always looking out for the best of others. She is not going on vacation, she is going to visit her "connections" in Tennessee. While on the drive, to their destination, she sits and admires the scenery as the others are more interested in the funny papers or the sports section. She brings the cat along on the trip for the good of the cat. She didn't want the cat to accidently kill himself by turning on the gas on the stove or something. She is the "Christ-like" figure of this story, and this is more relevant at the end of the story when she confronts the Misfit. Just like in so many other O'Connor stories the grandmother, the good character, is going to take the hardest fall.
The Misfit appears many different ways in this story. His first appearance in the story he seems to be a scholar. Wearing his silver-rimmed glasses and a black hat. This description would also fit a description of a rabbi. This image comes just by looking at his head. His shirtless torso and blue jeans, which didn't quite fit right, and gun in hand, kind of veer us away from thinking of him as being a good man. Of course the limitations of his chara...
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...mily is in reference to the disciples. No matter what it the acions were, they followed grandmother, the Christ-like figure. They also were oppressed, but by death, in a way as the disciples were for following Christ.
At the conclusion the reader is left with a vision of destruction of human life both literal and figurative that is absurd rather than tragic because the victims are not heroic figures reduced to misfortune, They are ordinary characters who meet a grotesque fate.
Works Cited
Currie, Sheldon. "A Good Grandmother is Hard to Find: Story as Exemplum," The Antigonish Review (Spring-Summer 1990):143-55. Short Story Criticism. Vol. 23. 223-225.
Schaub, Thomas Hill. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Short Story Criticism. Vol. 23. 233-235.
Shenck, Mary Jane. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Short Story Criticism. Vol. 23. 220-223.
As I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, I find myself being completely consumed by the rich tale that the author weaves; a tragic and ironic tale that concisely and precisely utilizes irony and foreshadowing with expert skill. As the story progresses, it is readily apparent that the story will end in a tragic and predictable state due to the devices which O’Connor expertly employs and thusly, I find that I cannot stop reading it; the plot grows thicker with every sentence and by doing so, the characters within the story are infinitely real in my mind’s eye. As I consider these factors, the story focuses on two main characters; that of the grandmother, who comes across as self-centered and self-serving and The Misfit, a man, who quite ingeniously, also appears to be self-centered and self-serving. It is the story behind the grandmother, however, that evidence appears to demonstrate the extreme differences between her superficial self and the true character of her persona; as the story unfolds, and proof of my thought process becomes apparently clear.
This essay will contrast a good and evil concept between two different stories. There is an obvious distinction that stands out between the stories; however they are similar in one way. In A Worn Path (Eudora Welty) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Conner) the one thing that sticks out, is the main character in both stories. The main character in both stories being the grandmother. Grandmothers are of course an important part of the family. In each story we have a grandmother of a different race, appearance, and attitude. In each story the grandmothers take different journeys, but there is one thing they both face being treated disrespected. We live in a world in which the grandmother resides with the family and helps to take care of the grandchildren. In the world today things are different and times are still hard if not harder. We live in a time when respect is no longer earned. Now days it seems as if respect is not as important as it was in earlier years and it is evident in these two stories.
The Misfit; is the epitome of the Godless man in a Godless society. He is a killer who is also raised without spirituality as the old woman's children. He is the representative of evil.
Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is one of the most well-known short stories in American history. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a disturbing short story that exemplifies grace in extremity as well as the threat of an intruder. The story tells of an elderly grandmother and her family who embark on a road trip to Florida. The grandmother is a stubborn old woman with a low sense of morality. While on the trip, the grandmother convinces her son to take a detour which results in a broken down car and an encounter with a convicted fugitive, The Misfit. Although the grandmother pleads for mercy, The Misfit kills off the rest of her family. Through the grace she finds in her extreme circumstance, the grandmother calls The Misfit her own and implores him to spare her life. The Misfit does not oblige her and states after her death, “She would have been a good woman if it had been someone to shoot her every day of her life.” Through Flannery O’Connor’s disturbing and shocking display of the grandmother’s demise, she gives the reader a sense of the threatening power of an intruder and the idea of extreme situations bringing about a state of grace. The reason for such a powerful work may have resulted from Flannery O’Connor’s religious upbringing as well as the state of the nation at the time.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are two short stories written by Flannery O’Connor during her short lived writing career. Despite the literary achievements of O’Connor’s works, she is often criticized for the grotesqueness of her characters and endings of her short stories and novels. Her writings have been described as “understated, orderly, unexperimental fiction, with a Southern backdrop and a Roman Catholic vision, in defiance, it would seem, of those restless innovators who preceded her and who came into prominence after her death”(Friedman 4). “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Good Country People” are both set in the South, and O’Connor explores the tension between the old and new South. The stories are tow ironically twisted tales of different families whos lives are altered after trusting a stranger, only to be mislead. Each story explores the themes of Christian theology, new verses the old South, and fallen human nature.
Bandy, Stephen C. "One of my babies": The Misfit and the Grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's short story 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. Studies in Short Fiction; Winter 1996, v33, n1, p107(11)
O’Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Story and Its Writer. Charters, Ann. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/ST. Martin's, 2011. 676-687. Print.
The irony at the end of this story is very interesting. O’ Connor forces the reader to wonder which characters are “Good Men”, perhaps by the end of the story she is trying to convey two points: first, that a discerning “Good Man” can be very difficult, second that a manipulative, self centered, and hollow character: The Grandmother is a devastating way to be, both for a person individually and for everyone else around them. The reader is at least left wondering if some or all of the clues to irony I provided apply in some way to the outcome of this story.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Literature: Fiction. 9th ed. New York:
Elmore Leonard once said “I don’t judge in my books. I don’t have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It’s just how it comes out. I’m just telling a story.” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O'Connor, is one of the most interesting stories that we have read in this class. The protagonist in this story is the grandmother and the antagonist is The Misfit. In any other short story, the protagonist and the antagonist would not have much in common, but that is not the case in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. The three major similarities between the grandmother and The Misfit is that they are both the oldest one in their groups, they are both hypocrites, and they both are missing important spiritual relationships.
The grandmother is the central character in the story "A good man is hard to find," by Flannery O'Connor. The grandmother is a manipulative, deceitful, and self-serving woman who lives in the past. She doesn't value her life as it is, but glorifies what it was like long ago when she saw life through rose-colored glasses. She is pre-scented by O'Connor as being a prim and proper lady dressed in a suit, hat, and white cotton gloves. This woman will do whatever it takes to get what she wants and she doesn't let anyone else's feelings stand in her way. She tries to justify her demands by convincing herself and her family that her way is not only the best way, but the only way. The grandmother is determined to change her family's vacation destination as she tries to manipulate her son into going to Tennessee instead of Florida. The grandmother says that "she couldn't answer to her conscience if she took the children in a direction where there was a convict on the loose." The children, they tell her "stay at home if you don't want to go." The grandmother then decides that she will have to go along after all, but she is already working on her own agenda. The grandmother is very deceitful, and she manages to sneak the cat in the car with her. She decides that she would like to visit an old plantation and begins her pursuit of convincing Bailey to agree to it. She describes the old house for the children adding mysterious details to pique their curiosity. "There was a secret panel in this house," she states cunningly knowing it is a lie. The grandmother always stretches the truth as much as possible. She not only lies to her family, but to herself as well. The grandmother doesn't live in the present, but in the past. She dresses in a suit to go on vacation. She states, "in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." She constantly tries to tell everyone what they should or should not do. She informs the children that they do not have good manners and that "children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else." when she was a child.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Story and Its Writer An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2011. 1042-053. Print.
In the beginning of the short story O’Connor’s use of a dark and humorous tone allows the audience to feel pity for the grandmother. The first sentence, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” shows the reader the family does not worry about the grandmother’s
Beginning the story of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the readers are introduced to an elderly woman and