Her style is always a bit more indirect. How does she try to get Bailey not to go to Florida? Not by saying, "Well I want to go to Tennessee," but by trying to scare him with reports of a criminal on the loose, called The Misfit, and guilt trip him about taking his children there. Through the rest of the story we see the grandmother using the same tactics again to get her way. Such as when her son Bailey does not want her to bring her cat Pitty Sing on the trip.
The grandmother is persistent on not going to Florida as they have been there before states, “’The children have been to Florida before,’ the old lady said. “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.’” (Kirszner and Mandell)The grandmother made every excuse as to why they should not go to Florida. While traveling to Florida, the family of six traveled outside of a small town called Toombsboro, when the grandmother awaken and recalled an old plantation that she visited when she was a young lady. She described a beautiful house with “six white
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
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.
Nobody listens to her and the trip will end up in tragedy. The writer uses a simple story to show how simple events can have dramatic effects on our life. On the road to Florida they take a side road to look at an old house that the grandmother wanted to see. The father had initially refused to take that side road but he gave up after the children insisted. To gain their support, the grandmother had mentioned the existence of “secret panels” in the house.
English 2030 March 27, 2013 Reading Review Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” the grandmother equates that a man is a “good man” if his values are the same as her own. The barbeque owner Red Sammy is “good” because he trusts people blindly by letting them charge gas and is also nostalgic about more innocent times because both of are moral characteristics the grandmother can relate to. The Misfit is “good” because he won’t shoot a lady because that would be in line with her own moral code. Her notion proves to be false and the only thing “good” about the Misfit is his consistency in living out his moral code of “no pleasure but meanness.” The Grandmother is confident
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).
Joe Keller is a man who loves his family above all else, and has sacrificed everything, including his integrity, in his struggle to make the family successful. In the first scene of the play, Miller presents Joe Keller to the audience as a “good guy”. At first he appears a likeable man who has made his own fortune. He is practical, a reasonable father and a considerate husband. He lacks education but is perceptive, additionally a good business man.
After the grandma is unable to persuade the family not to go to Florida, they do so anyways. Still in fear of the misfit, the grandma says: “I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that a loose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (2). Ironically, the family ends up meeting the Misfit later in the story because of the grandma’s lack of knowledge of directions to a house with a “secret panel.” The reader is able to identify from the beginning that the grandma is one to not stick by her word and also thinks of herself more highly than she really is. She portrays herself as a “lady;” however, she does not know the true definition of
In O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Baileys mother, the grandmother, views herself as a proper southern “lady” who is upright, wise and essentially a good person. But to the reader, recognition of contradictions in her character tells a different story. The grandmother has a superficial sense of goodness. She seems to view goodness mostly as a function of being decent, having good manners, and coming from a family of the right people, but her superficial goodness meets genuine evil in the Misfit. The inability to recognize the distinction from her false goodness and genuine goodness in people and things around her, leads to the demise of her and her family.