A Good Man Is Hard To Find A Good Man Is Hard To Find, a short story written by Flannery O’Connor, is about a selfish, dishonest woman, who thinks as herself as a superior being. However, in the end, she realizes that she too has faults of her own. The Protagonist of the story is the grandmother. In the beginning of the story, she tries to convince her son Bailey, and his wife, to take their family trip to east Tennessee rather than to go to Florida. The grandmother reads in the newspaper about a convicted killer, The Misfit, who has escaped from the Federal Pen, and is headed towards Florida.
Hangcheng Zhou Instructor Fox Writing 102 Section 38 27 Feb.2012 No Absolute Barrier between Good and Evil in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O’Connor, is an example of Southern Gothic fiction that uses a series of ironic events set in the American South to explore certain values. The author creates two seemingly opposite characters, the grandmother and the Misfit to show her opinions about what is good and evil. The grandmother regards herself as a graceful and devout lady, but actually she is so self-obsessed and shallow that her behavior leads to her entire family’s death. By contrast, the Misfit is an obvious villain who never pretends to be a good man and, quite ironically, he may be the only one in this story who has deep thoughts about life. Through the development of the story, readers may draw the conclusion that there is no straightforward answer to what is good and evil in the world.
This negative thinking quite possibly could have led to the ultimate rendezvous between the convict and the family. The following day the family heads off to Florida. Another major point of irony happens as the story revolves around the grandmother’s traditional southern values of respect for other people, especially elders. At the same moment as the grandmother is lecturing her grandkids, John Wesley and June Star, about respecting their home state she sees a young Negro boy and says: "Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!”. Her hypocrisy becomes evident as she wants the family to do what she says not what she does.
Lily also lives with her father and she says in the book that it never felt right to call him dad so she just settled on T. Ray. T. Ray is abusive and convinces Lily that her mother’s death is all her fault by telling her that she picked up the gun and it went off in her hands and killed her mother and that her mother didn’t care about her at all and left her. The date is 1964 and President Johnson has just signed the Civil Rights Act. Rosaleen decides that she wants to register to vote and Lily walks with her into town. As they reach the outskirts of town Rosaleen and Lily come across three white men who harass Rosaleen.
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
O’Connor seems to suggest that only through conflict of religion can the “good” be found. Bailey's mother views herself as a proper southern lady—genteel, upright, and wise but to the reader; her actions reveal her as another person. She primps excessively, lies, and uses racist language, like using the words “pickaninny” and “riggers” to describe a child of African descent. She begrudges America's goodwill contributions to postwar Europe, and foolishly blurts out that she recognizes The Misfit. The beginning of the story starts off with the Grandmother trying to persuade her family not to take the road trip to Florida.
She manipulates her son by giving him a newspaper and Grandmother says, “’The Misfit is a loose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people’” (O’Conner 420). The family was set on going to Florida, but Grandma wanted to go to Tennessee to see friends. O’Conner stated, “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 Bailey's mind” (420). The grandmother wanted to go and see her friends in Tennessee instead of Florida, which is where the family wanted to go.
This newly belief she holds only became apparent when she was face to face with her killer and on the verge of death. Many writers, Jenn Alves-Jackson, Brenda Brandon, and Gary Sloan, agree with this irony that takes place between the grandmother and the Misfit. They argue the fact that a good man is truly hard to find. This essay will focus on the different character flaws and ironic situations that are present within “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Also, the essay analyzes how Jackson portrays the grandmother, her actions, and the character flaws that she represents throughout the story.
A passive mother and her baby, and the two difficult children. As the family is getting ready to part, the grandmother, Alarmed by newspaper accounts of an escaped convict, The Misfit, attempts to persuade the family to change their vacation destination away from the vicinity of the fugitive. This intent fails as usual so the family starts its journey. As they are traveling the grandmother relates the story of a nearby plantation house with a secret panel. 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.
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).