CHARACTER ANALYSIS Character Analysis The grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is selfish and manipulative. The very first thing that is learned about her is that she does not want to go to Florida because she has relatives in Tennessee that she would rather go visit. Then the second thing about her is that whenever something runs up against the grandmother's will, she still tries to have it her way. She never does this openly or bluntly, though. Her style is always a bit more indirect.
Naomi Long Professor Lockhart English 1102 February 07, 2012 “A Goodman is Hard to Find” Imagine driving for hours on vacation only to be murdered by a serial killer. Unfortunately this is the reality of Flannery O'Connor's character, a nameless grandmother, in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Driven by her self-righteousness, the grandmother considers herself morally superior to others because she is a faithful lady. As the story unfolds the reader's discover that the grandmother is morally corrupt, and awakens to her moral corruption through the antagonist, The Misfit. O'Connors use of foreshadowing and characterization conveys the general idea that their is a thin line
Title effectiveness 1. Unstable Situation: The conflict in this story is the grandmother being unloving and manipulative. She always thinks she’s always right and never wrong. Some examples from the story are as fallow: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Baily’s mind” (pg.
Then when she gave birth to her twins sons, she acted as if she did not want them and I believe that Cathy was selfish was because she shot her husband in the shoulder. Also Faye left all of her earnings and possessions, including the brothel to Cathy in her will. So in order to take advantage of Faye Cathy poisoned her until she died. I do not think this was right of Cathy because Faye truly seemed to care about her. If I had the opportunity to meet Catherine Amesbury or Cathy Ames I would not take it.
As the family sets off for their trip, all the grandmother does is complain that she would rather go to Tennessee. When she wasn’t even really invited, but rather going because she doesn’t like to miss out on anything. “Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.” (O’Connor 367). As the trip is under way she believes she is in another state, and mistakes a road for another one.
Also, she insists on unnecessarily bringing her cat along for the three day trip though she knows her son Bailey does not like traveling with pets. The grandmother’s badgering takes place in front of the grandchildren and she undermines her son’s role as a parent when she says “’ "The children have been to Florida before…you all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee’” (O’Connor 186). So after all of this “the next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go”, in her Sunday best no less, a clear act of spite because her efforts have not changed her son’s resolve to go to Florida. In his critical essay “Secular Meaning in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'” Stanley Renner says “the grandmother is a caricature of the South, but in the way that her every impulse is tainted by instinctive, unconscious egoism, she is also a droll personification of human nature as we have come to understand it in the wake of Darwin and Freud; she is, then, Reality” (Renner).
She was a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; no longer a boy, but an "it." A Child Called “It” describes one of the worst documented cases of child abuse in California history. Dave lived I a world of starvation, cruelty, and torture from the age of four until he was rescued by school officials at the age of twelve. In the following scene, Dave’s mother is yelling at him and tried to force him to lie on flames so she could watch
The real misfit !! In Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” she identifies hat the fugitative is the misfit although the grandmother is more likely to be the misfit. It seems as like the family doesn't like her, and she is the oldest on the road trip. For instance it says in the story when she tries to tell bailey and the children's mother that is a bad Idea to go to Florida because of the fugitive that is loose going to Florida. When she was trying to tell every one about the fugitive they acted like they couldn’t hear her for instance in the “ The grandmother when she showed her son Bailey the newspaper about the fugitive he just continued to to his reading ignoring the grandmother.
Good versus Evil: A look at the never ending battle through the eyes of Flannery O’Connor as portrayed in A Good Man is Hard to Find Good versus Evil: A look at the never ending battle through the eyes of Flannery O’Connor as portrayed in A Good Man is Hard to Find A Good Man is Hard to Find is O’Connor’s portrayal of religious conflict between good and evil. It is also one of impending doom which was lived by O’Connor throughout her life after being diagnosed with Lupus (Diyanni, 2007, p.184) a condition which ultimately killed her father (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008). The conflict is played out throughout the story by morally flawed characters in the form indifference, disrespect, manipulation and the threat of and ultimate loss of life. Being raised as a southerner and a Catholic, it is logical that she would use the never-ending battle between good and evil as a base for this story. O’Connor uses what is defined as the southern gothic style: the avoidance of perpetuating stereotypes of the “Old South” such as the dainty southern belle from the classic genre but using instead the gothic types like the “spiteful spinster” and portraying them in a more realistic manner.
The first thing we learned about the grandmother is that she does not want to go on the family vacation to Florida. She has relatives to see in Tennessee so she tries to persuade Bailey, the father in the story, not to go. The grandmother tries to scare him with reports of a criminal on the loose and guilt trip him about taking his children there. She states, "Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.