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.
Secrets In Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees Lily Owens is seeking to find the truth behind her mother Deborah Owens’s death. Since her mother’s death Lily’s life is incomplete, she hears stories from her father (who she calls T-Ray) about her mother but does not believe them. She has been living with guilt since that one night after killing her mother. T-Ray tells Lily that her mother ran away and left her behind, Lily believes he is just saying to punish her, and does not believe what he says. She says, “What if my mother leaving wasn’t true?
The grandmother wanted to go and see her friends in Tennessee instead of Florida, which is where the family wanted to go. The Grandmother lied and said that the Misfit would be in Florida instead of Tennessee. She did this so Baily, her son, would change his mind about where the family would go for the trip. Throughout the story, the Grandmother is very noisy. She is very concerned with small ideas.
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. The grandmother is a pretentious character who considers herself as a moral lady with a faithful belief in Christianity, However, she only cares about herself and pretends to be considerate of others. In the beginning of the story, she uses the report about the Misfit to try to convince her family not to go to Florida for vacation. She tells Bailey, her son, “ I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did”(O’Connor, 9).
The grandmother frequently criticizes others on their behavior, such as when she complains about vacationing in Florida where the escaped convict could be and how it would weigh heavily on her conscience. She criticizes the children’s mother, accusing her of not wanting to travel to a place that would allow her children to “be broad” (261). She criticizes the children for not being respectful of their native state Georgia. She never criticizes herself, not even when she realizes that the house with the secret panel she had been thinking of (and the whole cause of the detour) was not in Georgia but actually Tennessee. In her final moments,
This thought of hers goes to show that she is not necessarily considerate of others, because while she may look like a lady while she dies, she doesn’t keep in mind that if the car were to get into an accident, the rest of the family would probably die as well. The grandmother also takes her cat on the trip, even though it is mentioned her son would not like to have a cat on the vacation. On the road, the grandmother attempts to steer her grandkids off the direction of her idea of materialism (reading comic books, and not paying attention to the beauty outside). She consistently talks about how times are so much worse than what they were during her youth, and finally convinces the kids to want to go to an old house she recalled. Unfortunately though, on the dirt road she remembers that the house is not where she originally thought it was, and causes the family to drive into a ditch.
The grandmother mentions that there is a fugitive on the loose called the Misfit and that they might run into him if they go to Florida but again, this line of reasoning has no effect on them. They tell her if she does not want to go to Florida she does not have to but they all knew that she would not miss a trip for anything in the world. The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car and ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She does not intent for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because she would miss her too much and she is afraid that the cat may brush against one of the gas burners and asphyxiate himself.
This is the first example of the conceited ways that lead her to her demise. She wants to uproot the whole family, only for her benefit. She also does not want to go to Florida because there is an escaped convict on the loose. She says, "The Misfit is a loose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to those people" (O’Connor 299). The day of the trip Grandma is the first packed and ready to go.
In the beginning of the story, the grandma is more irritating towards the family and always trying to get her way: “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 been to east Tennessee” (299). John Wesley says, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” (300). June Star agrees and adds, “She wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks, afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go” (300).
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).