A Good Man is Hard to Find is a short story by American writer Flannery O’Conner. First published in 1953, it is one of her most famous stories.Flannery O’Connor was a prolific author of short stories, producing several over the course of a relatively short life-span. Her work fell within the genre of Southern Gothic; A Good Man is Hard to Find is an especially illustrative example. Southern Gothic tales are set in the American South and narrate strange, almost disturbing events. The settings are rich with local character and color.
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Setting and Characters in A Good Man is Hard to Find
A Good Man is Hard to Find revolves around a road trip taken by a family from Atlanta, Georgia to Florida. The family consists of Bailey, his wife, three children—John Wesley, June Star, and an unnamed baby—and his mother. Bailey’s mother appears to be the protagonist of the story, and though the story has a third-person narrator, most of the events are related from a perspective close to that of Bailey’s mother. She is simply referred to as “the grandmother.”
A Good Man is Hard to Find: Summary
The story begins the day before the road trip. The grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida; she would prefer going to East Tennessee instead to visit her relatives. She has spent a great deal of time trying to convince her son, Bailey, to change their destination, but he pays her no attention.
This morning is the grandmother’s last attempt to persuade Bailey and change his mind. She refers to an article in the paper about an escaped convict called The Misfit, who has been attacking people. According to the report, he appears to be headed toward Florida. She tells him that it would not be safe for their family to go there themselves. Bailey does not respond to her in any way, continuing to read the sports section of the paper he is engrossed in.
The early mention of The Misfit foreshadows the story‘s end.
Unable to get her son to listen to her, the grandmother then turns her focus onto her daughter-in-law—a seemingly innocent young woman who is feeding her youngest child, a baby. The grandmother tells her that the children ought to have different experiences; they’ve been to Florida before and, therefore, East Tennessee would be a change for them. Here, too, she finds no response to her words.
Instead, her grandchildren—eight-year-old John Wesley and his younger sister, June Star—have a question for her: if she doesn’t want to go to Florida with them, why doesn’t the grandmother just stay home. June Star believes that the grandmother would not stay home alone for even “a million bucks” and that she needs to accompany them everywhere.
The next day, the family sets out for their journey to Florida. Despite her reticence, the grandmother is the first one in the car. She has smuggled her cat, Pitty Sing, into the car with her even though Bailey does not like it. She believes that three days is a long time for the cat to be left alone and is afraid that, in their absence, it might accidentally asphyxiate itself.
The grandmother is frequently ignored or ridiculed by her family. But this does not prevent her from continuously expressing her own opinions.
The grandmother has dressed carefully with great attention to detail. In particular, she has pinned a sachet of flowers to her dress which, in the event of a fatal accident, would mark her as a “lady.”
As they set off, the grandmother engages herself with a continuous commentary on the scenery they are passing by and on her son’s driving. She is dismayed to find that John Wesley and June Star are not impressed by the state of Georgia, their birth state, and what it has to offer; they ask their father to speed through till the Georgia border, so they don’t have to spend too much time in the state. She tells them about her own childhood and how children at the time respected their native states. She then points out a small graveyard that once used to be part of a large plantation; the plantation itself is now “Gone With the Wind” according to the grandmother.
She then tells the children a story from her youth. The grandmother had once been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden. He would bring her a watermelon every Sunday with his initials—E.A.T.— carved into them. One Sunday, she wasn’t home when he brought it around and he left it at her door. By the time she returned home, a negro boy had eaten the watermelon as he saw the initials and read them as an instruction to eat it. The grandmother finds the incident especially humorous. June Star, on the other hand, is not impressed; in her opinion, she’d be better off marrying a wealthy man than one who wooed her with watermelons. At this, the grandmother informs June Star that Mr. Teagarden had, in fact, been a well-off gentleman, and he had remained so at the time of his death as he had invested in Coca-Cola’s stock.
The family then stops at a restaurant—The Tower—and while there, they strike up a conversation with the owner, Red Sammy, and his wife. Red Sammy tells them that he regrets allowing two men buying gas from him on credit a few days ago. He feels he cannot trust them to keep their word. Talk then turns to The Misfit and Red Sammy’s wife’s concerns that their establishment might be attacked by him. The upshot of the conversation is that a great deal is changing in America around them and that “a good man is hard to find” these days.
The changing cultural and social landscape of the USA in the 1950s makes “a good man hard to find” in the eyes of the generation of the grandmother and Red Sammy.
Back on the road, the grandmother recalls an old plantation house that they will pass. She used to visit it as a young woman, and she suddenly now feels the desire to visit it again. She embellishes her memories, telling the children that there is a secret panel containing the house’s owner’s silver in the house. This piques their interest, and they pester Bailey until he agrees to make a quick detour to the house.
The grandmother directs him to make a turn down a dirt road. However, as they go down it and find themselves unable to locate the house, she comes to the sudden realization that she had been thinking of a place in East Tennessee and not Georgia. She is startled, and her sudden movement nudges Pitty Sing out of his basket. The cat lands on Bailey’s shoulder, who instantly loses control of the car. It rolls off the road and overturns. The accident shocks all the passengers, but everyone seems fine; the worst injury is to Bailey’s wife, who has a broken shoulder.
The grandmother doesn’t confess her mistake, scared of Bailey’s anger. The family sits in a ditch hoping for another vehicle to pass through and help them. They soon see a car approaching, and the grandmother flags it down. There are three men in the car who get down at the mention of the accident.
The driver appears to be older than the other two men and seems to be their leader. He has a gun with him, and the grandmother feels that he is very familiar to her but cannot place him. She suddenly blurts out that she recognizes him as The Misfit. He replies in the affirmative but adds that it would have been better if she hadn’t recognized him. This upsets Bailey who is very sharp with his mother.
The grandmother tries to appeal to The Misfit, telling him that she believes him to be a good man and that he is from a “nice” family. He tells her that his parents were the “finest people indeed” and then orders his men to take Bailey and John Wesley into the neighboring woods to ask them a few questions. The grandmother tries to stop them but doesn’t succeed.
Multiple missteps and errors in judgement by the grandmother land the family in their final predicament with The Misfit.
The Misfit then apologizes to the women for being without a shirt in their presence, as he and his men are escaped prisoners and have to make do with what they can steal from others. The grandmother asks him if he prays; he doesn’t. There is the sound of a pistol shot from the woods. The Misfit continues, telling them that he has been in prison for a long time for a crime he does not remember committing. According to the authorities, he had killed his father. The grandmother urges him to pray, but he believes he is better off without it.
One of the men returns, holding the shirt Bailey had been wearing. The Misfit puts it on and then orders Bailey’s wife and remaining children to follow his man into the woods.
The grandmother is shocked and can barely speak except to repeat Jesus’ name over and over again. The Misfit tells her that the reason for his name is because he has been punished for a crime he doesn’t remember and doesn’t believe took place.
The grandmother then starts pleading with him—he is from a good family, and it would not be right to shoot a woman. She gets increasingly hysterical and then tells him, “You’re one of my own children!” She tries to touch him, but The Misfit shoots her three times in the chest.
The Misfit’s men return from the woods and, on seeing her dead body, remark that the old woman had been a talker. The Misfit’s response is that she would’ve “been a good woman” if someone had been around “to shoot her every minute of her life.” The story ends with him saying that there is no real pleasure in life.
