The Tragic Fall of the Family In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, the author creates a character called The Misfit who kills a family. The story begins with the family discussing where to travel on their vacation. The grandmother tries to tell the family that there is an escaped convict in Florida where they are travelling and that they should not go there. But instead the family does not listen to her and they are destined for tragedy. There are many elements that foreshadow the tragic events to come.
The beginning of the story starts off with the Grandmother trying to persuade her family not to take the road trip to Florida. She brings up the release of the Misfit, a serial killer, saying "I couldn't answer to my conscience" if the family came across him as if she was referring to herself. From here, every decision or thought made by the Grandmother steers her wrong, as a consequence for ignoring her first instinct. The Grandmother is first in the car, ready to go. She dresses like a lady "just in case" something may happen to her.
In the novel ‘The Woman in Black’ by Susan Hill. We look at the turning point which is crucial to Arthur kipps’s life while he is on a business trip. The point which changes him is when the woman in black whistles spider out to the marshes to try and get Arthur to follow and drown, this crucially changes Arthur as now he realises that she is sinister and he is no longer interested in finding out more about her, he now believes she is a dangerous ghost when he sees her on the way back to the house, the consequences of this are that his future son dies, after that Arthurs life changes forever. This is why this point in the book is so crucial. Arthur and the dog spider are both walking about the estate when then spider is whistled out to the marshes.
Due to the wealth Joe starts to change his ways and treats Janie differently. Once Jody dies, Janie likes having the independence; at first, she rejects the marriage proposals she receives until she meets Tea Cake, and falls madly in love with him. Two years after their marriage, a hurricane hits and a rabid dog bites Tea Cake and unaware that the dog has rabies. He becomes ill and starts to believe that Janie is cheating on him, which makes him start to shoot at her with a gun. Out of self defense, Janie kills him and is immediately put on trial for murder.
Also, Homer Barron, the man who has been seeing Miss Emily, unexpectedly disappears. “Everyone…said, ‘She will marry him.’…, ‘She will persuade him yet,’ because Homer himself had remarked—he liked men,….that he was not a marrying man”(704). Faulkner leads the reader to believe that Miss Emily has poisoned Homer Baron, which is an action of insanity. Next, William foreshadows insanity when Miss Emily’s house begins to smell extremely bad and the townspeople have to
The grandmother then brings up the topic after noting an article about an escaped convict called “The Misfit” who was heading in the same destination, which was Florida. After all of the disagreements about not wanting to go to Florida, the family still insisted that they were going and nothing will deter them from going. The very next morning the family sets on the long-awaited trip to Florida. The grandmother hides her cat (Pitty Sing) into a basket in the back of the car—she had this notion that she couldn’t “bear” to leave her cat at home while they are on vacation. Also, she wore a dress and a hat with flower designs so people can discern that she is “a lady” if there is any accident that might ensue.
In Fear and Faith Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is a sense of a “wrong turn” story: a family on a car trip attempts to find the childhood home or their matriarch, a seemingly senile old woman, becomes lost and comes to a very horrible end. Readers are astonished by the way the story ends brutally. The Grandmother tells “The Misfit” “Why you’re one of my own children” and touches him on the shoulder. This triggers a kind of automatic horror and shoots her three times. After his partners in crime returns from killing the other family members, he tells them that the Grandmother “would have been a good woman” had there been somebody there “to shoot her every minute of her life.” The two details- the Grandmother’s words to the misfit and his sudden
She is the one that is the most guilty of commiting sins and not following the word of God. First she sneaks her cat on the trip even though she knows deep within her heart that her son Bailey, “wouldn’t like to arrive at the motel with a cat”(332). The grandmother also lies to the children about a secret panel that is in a house along the way to Florida. She does this to merely fulfill her own desire to go and see this plantation house. After a while of riding on the bumpy road to this house she realizes that this is not the road and that the house is in Tennesse but she keeps it to herself so that she can avoid “Bailey’s wrath”(336).
The story fires the children's interest, consequently forcing Bailey, to take an unplanned detour down a rough dirt road in search of the house. Suddenly, the grandmother realizes that her memory has deceived her and her struggle for the embarrassment, she involuntarily releases the cat from its hiding place, causing Bailey to lose control of the car. As the family members struggle to free themselves from the ensuing wreck, three
O'Connor's irony can be seen as sacramental, not because it works with the stuff of religious belief and non-belief, which it does, but because it itself operates as a vehicle of revelation. (Wynne) From the very beginning of the story the grandmother uses a newspaper article about a recent escapee to try to deter the family from driving down to Florida because she would rather go to Tennessee. She warns them that the Misfit is on the loose and if they ran into him it would be trouble. This is ironic because the Misfit is exactly who they ran into on their trip, she was dramatically warning the family of the worst situation possible, and ironically the worst situation possible is exactly what they got. Not all the irony in the story was dark.