Such as when her son Bailey does not want her to bring her cat Pitty Sing on the trip. Instead of arguing about it she just hides the cat in a basket and brings it anyway. The grandmother then wishes to go visit an old plantation along the way yet knows that Bailey will not want to do this, her solution to this is to let the children persuade him. She tells the children of a house filled with secret panels and hidden treasure, this in turn gets them excited and begging Bailey to take them there for a visit. It is quite clear that through her actions that the grandmother is very selfish thus trying to satisfy her selfishness by manipulating others.
Naomi Long Professor Lockhart English 1102 February 07, 2012 “A Goodman is Hard to Find” Imagine driving for hours on vacation only to be murdered by a serial killer. Unfortunately this is the reality of Flannery O'Connor's character, a nameless grandmother, in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Driven by her self-righteousness, the grandmother considers herself morally superior to others because she is a faithful lady. As the story unfolds the reader's discover that the grandmother is morally corrupt, and awakens to her moral corruption through the antagonist, The Misfit. O'Connors use of foreshadowing and characterization conveys the general idea that their is a thin line
For some reason though, we don't quite believe her. The rest of the story shows the grandmother doing more of the same. We learn that Bailey doesn't want her to bring the cat. Instead of causing a ruckus (Bailey's the type who would make a big stink), the grandmother just hides the cat in a basket and secretly brings it along. The grandmother decides she wants to go see the old plantation, but knows Bailey won't
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a story about a southern family and their conflict they are faced with while driving down south to Florida. Morals are challenged face to face at its finest in this short story when two very different groups of people happen to cross paths resulting in a tragedy. The grandmother in the story consistently uses the word “good” many times throughout the story, specifically when she tells Red Sammy he is a good man and of course the Misfits also. The word good was used for the wrong meaning by the grandmother; Her judgment was poor and unwise which ended up costing her family and herself their lives. People are all different in their own ways, not everyone has the same perspectives on life and moral
Irony within “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” In the story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a sequence of events that lead to a miserable and deathly vacation for a family of six. The family consisting of a grandma, her son, his wife and three children plan a road trip to Florida. Everyone except the grandma is fond of the vacation site, simply because she would rather go to East Tennessee. She tries to justify her thoughts be making a remark about how there is a dangerous criminal on the loose and headed straight for Florida. When this does not work, the grandma then quotes, “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” (3).
Even the clock, still a few minutes off noon..", time is going by slow for Ellen as she awaits for Paul to return to the house. Ellen becomes angry at Paul when she asks Paul to move out of the house "there was a dark resentment in her voice now..." so they can be away from the dust storm. Also Ellen wants to move because she thinks that it hard for their baby to breathe because of the dust in the air. The feeling of isolation creeps up on Ellen when Paul is not there and she knows that the nearest neighbors are far away and her house would be very hard to reach in the dust storm that she is experiencing. Another reason that Ellen feels isolated is of lack of communication with others this causes her to break down and eventually run away with the baby to try to get away from the storm "I'm so caged- if I could only break away and run".
Kethia Joseph 3/7/2011 “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by FLANNERY O’CONNOR A family of six is planning a vacation trip to Florida. The family consists of the grandmother, the father, the mother and three children. The grandmother tried to convince her son to go to Tennessee instead of Florida. She is concerned about a criminal on the loose who is also going to Florida. Nobody listens to her and the trip will end up in tragedy.
• Dramatic irony occurs when a character in a literary work fails to perceive what is obvious to the reader (or, in the case of a play, the audience). The most famous example of dramatic irony in literature occurs in Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex, when he fails to realize what is clear to the audience: that a traveler he kills on a road is his own father and that a woman he marries is his own mother. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Bailey's mother views herself as a proper southern lady—genteel, upright, wise. But to the reader, her actions reveal her as another person. She primps excessively, lies, uses racist language, begrudges America's goodwill contributions to postwar Europe, and foolishly blurts out that she recognizes The Misfit.
The cat symbolizes the things in life that the wife wants but something is keeping from them. The idea of the cat being caught in the rain represents her dreams and wants being put on hold. When she goes out into the rain the cat has disappeared within a matter of minutes. This symbolizes her dreams constantly being pushed away by her husband. At the end of the story the maid brings a cat to the room; however, we do not know if it is the same cat that she saw in the rain.
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).