Brayan Burgos Dr. Stryffeler English 102 2/23/13 Short Story Analysis A family is planning a vacation in Florida, but their grandmother points out that there is an escaped murderer loose there and she would not take her family to such a place. She wants to go to east Tennessee. The next morning they head out and she sneaks her cat with them. After driving for a while, the grandmother thinks she remembers a plantation she once visited in this area. She suggests they go and the more she talks about it the more she wants to go.
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 likes to criticize others such as when she did so to the mother questioning her on the choice to always go to Florida instead of changing it up a bit for the kids. After they leave the food stop the grandmother woke up from a catnap and has a flashback of a dirt road she believed to recognize that belonged to a house she used to
1. TEXT: A Good Man is Hard To Find 2. DESCRIPTION: The story begins with a typical nuclear family from Georgia that is planning a family vacation to Florida but is being challenged by the grandmother who does not want to vacation in Florida. The grandmother has read about a crazed killer by the name of the misfit who has escaped from the pen and headed to Florida. _ Instead of staying behind the morning of the trip, the grandmother is the first one in the car.
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.
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.
An example of point of view in treating people equally occurs with Miss Caroline Fisher. After Miss Caroline asks Scout to read The Mobile Register she says “… tell your father not to teach you anymore” (Lee, 19). When she gets home, Scout tells her dad this and that she doesn’t want to go back to school. Atticus says “You can never really understand a person from their point of view until you climb into their skin and walk around in it” (Lee, 33). Another example of point of view in treating people equally occurs with Arthur (Boo) Radley.
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.
The grandmother is a complex character who believes that her conscience and faith are the motivating forces behind her moral superiority. She constantly passes judgement on others, but has the inability to see her flaws. As the story unfolds the grandmother is conveyed a racist, liar, and a hypocrite. On the road to Florida the family passes by a "pickaninny," boy with no pants, and the grandmother says that "He probably didn't have any" pants because "little niggers in the country don't have things like we do." The grandmother refers to the boy as a pickaninny and a nigger, two terms that are used to racially degrade African Americans, coloreds, or blacks.
Scout is very upset and sad about her first day and tells Atticus that she does not want to return to school. “You never went to school and you do all right so I’ll just stay home too. You can teach me like Granddaddy taught you ‘n’ Uncle Jack.” (32). I can empathize with