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.
After being in an accident, the family sets along a ditch, shaken up from the wreck when The Misfit and his accomplices arrive offering assistance. The grandmother tells The Misfit that she knows he is a good man, and comes from nice people. She loses all her moral value by trying to persuade The Misfit to spare her life even after he orders Bobby Lee and Hiram to take her family’s lives. The grandmother does not stand her ground towards the escaped inmate by offering him all the money she has on her, and by saying “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” Even when she states that Jesus may have not raised the dead. The grandmother is obviously Christian and begins to pray when she learns that The Misfit may take her life.
After a car accident occurs the family crosses paths with The Misfit, who eventually kills the entire family. The grandmother reveals her hypocrisy when she pleads with The Misfit to save her life because he is a good man who would not shoot a
I would not be able answer my conscience if I did.” She is too paranoid. She tries to control her son by trying to convince him to go on a vacation to Tennessee instead of Florida. On their way she brings her cat along she makes all kinds of excuse why the cat can’t stay at home. Also the grandmother goes to great lengths to dress in her best clothes. Another example of Southern Gothic.
_ Instead of staying behind the morning of the trip, the grandmother is the first one in the car. While traveling the grandmother tells the children a made up story about a plantation house that she had once visited with a secret panel only to excite the children so they would beg their parents to visit it. After a trip down the long dirt road the grandmother realizes that the plantation house was not in Georgia but in Tennessee. Too embarrassed to admit her mistake she causes her cat who she secretly concealed into the car jump out onto her son Baily who is driving. He then crashes the car into a ditch and the family is stranded.
By doing that, the cat that she snuck on the trip jumped out of the basket and made Bailey wreck the car. There was a car coming down the road and to the family’s surprise it was the Misfit and his crew. To their surprise, their life ended prematurely. “A Good Man is Hard Find” represents the work of a higher power. The death of the family might be an expression of an underlying design.
The grandmothers childish ways greatly contributes to their deaths. The grandmothers idea to go on a wild chase pushes Bailey over the edge and even makes the cat freak out and Bailey flips the car. The grandmothers try’s to talk her way out of death but it does not work in her favor. She is a mess of a woman that causes her own family to be killed. O’Conner creates a crazy grandmother who unfortunately causes the bad situation.
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).
They got into a car accident and was hoping a car would come along and they can get a ride. The car that came along ended up being the murderer on the loose named Misfit. He was accompanied by two other gentlemen who too were criminals. One of the killers told the mother to have her children come over to where she was and to sit by her. The story does not state the mother having any concern, or even try to plea with the murderer to not harm her children but she simply called them over to her.
A Good Man is Hard to Find Analysis In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor exposes a happy-seeming family to unexpected and graphic horror. The family sets out with the intent to enjoy a vacation, but ends up being blindsided by fate. This is similar to O'Connor's own life story, with her unexpectedly losing a parent at a young age. The story's protagonist is a woman that is obsessed with the past, and it would be easy to understand how a woman who lost her father at the age of fifteen not being able to fully recover from the trauma. However, O'Connor didn't intend to represent herself through the Grandmother, since the old woman displays many negative character traits such as arrogance and stupidity.