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.
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.
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).
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
Everyone except the grandmother, a selfish religious old woman, agrees on Florida as their destination. She tries to persuade her family to abandon their original plans, saying that there is an escaped killer on the loose, foreshadowing events that lead to the family’s murder. The grandmother is central to the rest of the story’s plot involving an accident where the family’s car flips resulting in a confrontation with the escaped convict, The Misfit. The grandmother, pointing out The Misfit’s identity, essentially dooms herself and her entire family. As a last plea to The Misfit, the grandmother attempts to manipulate his evil motives with a transcendence of religion that fails and ultimately drives him to murder her.
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).
“A work of literature, he believes, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, literary works must then be treated like a dream, applying psychoanalytic techniques to texts to uncover the author’s hidden motivations, repressed desires, and wishes” (Bressler 130). In the first paragraph of the story the grandmother is trying to persuade her son to not travel to Florida. She feels like she knows better than her son. Her grandchildren had been to Florida before, and she wishes her son would take a vacation to another destination.
Like many southerners, they make “polite” comments that are actually insults. You can see this when Red Sam’s wife comments about wanting June Star as her little girl. When June rudely refuses, Red Sam’s wife repeats “Ain’t she cute” almost as if she wish she were dead. During the 1940s, there was a clear divide between race in society. This may explain why June’s reaction to Red Sam’s African American wife was so rude.
It was in fact her own reinforcement that prompted the family to stray from the main path in search of some false Misfit. There were hints to the reader at the beginning of the story, that while on their vacation to Florida the family is destined to cross lost treasure. This decision was a deadly one. It caused the family to fall into the path of the Misfit. For example, “There is an inmate fellow that escaped from Federal Pen and headed toward Florida.
John sees a serious person as anxious and solemn while humorous person as relaxed, cheerful and dissatisfied. Therefore, Harvey argues that the individual approach humor and asses its value according to their approach to life. Therefore, individual approach to humor is unsuitable because expressing a sense of humor is a social act and how other people are involved in this humor is very essential (Harvey 26). Additionally, intentional humor incorporates the initiator, the audience and the subject of the joke. Therefore, humor is a chancy dealing because its succession relies on the response of the desired audience.