Fear In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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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…show more content…
He means that if someone were there to show the same kind of threat that he did, she would have shown the same compassion and grace her entire life. We do learn a little about the emotional side of the Misfit when he shoots the grandmother in the chest, he simply wipes his glasses and carries on. It is as though he realizes that he is an evil person and realizes that he could have turned out better if certain events in his life never happened and if he was present for a specific event. “I wish I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had been there I would have known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had been there I would have known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” He is implying that if he actually saw Jesus with his very own eyes and if he had seen the things that Jesus has done, he would have been a believer and lived a good

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