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.
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.
To deter the family from going to Florida and to go to Tennessee instead the grandmother claims that if they travel to Florida they would certainly have a run in with the Misfit, and it would end in a bad way for all of them. Now of course the grandmother doesn’t truly think this will happen. She is just trying to do or say anything to get her way. Her son realizes this and decides to head for Florida anyway. On the way to Florida they in fact do have an encounter with the misfit.
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 Tragic Fall of the Family In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, the author creates a character called The Misfit who kills a family. The story begins with the family discussing where to travel on their vacation. The grandmother tries to tell the family that there is an escaped convict in Florida where they are travelling and that they should not go there. But instead the family does not listen to her and they are destined for tragedy. There are many elements that foreshadow the tragic events to come.
In the beginning of the story, the grandmother was a selfish and manipulative person. By reading the first few sentences, you can notice that she does not want to go Florida because she wants to go to Tennessee to see some relatives. Whenever something runs up against the grandmother’s will, she tries to get it her way. She does not say I want to go to Tennessee, but she try to scarves him with the report of a criminal on the loose who is heading to Florida. She said, “Just you read it.
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.
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).
The story fires the children's interest, consequently forcing Bailey, to take an unplanned detour down a rough dirt road in search of the house. Suddenly, the grandmother realizes that her memory has deceived her and her struggle for the embarrassment, she involuntarily releases the cat from its hiding place, causing Bailey to lose control of the car. As the family members struggle to free themselves from the ensuing wreck, three