A Good Grandmother Is Hard To Find Analysis

A Good Grandmother Is Hard to Find “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” was written in 1955 by Flannery O’Connor. The author was a Roman Catholic who frequently wrote about people who had a strong sense of pride that made them a target for tragedy. The story is about a grandmother who manipulated her family into taking a detour on their family trip resulting in all of them being murdered. Not wanting to go Florida, she showed them a news story about an escaped prisoner named the “Misfit” who is supposedly headed there. The next morning they take off from Atlanta, Georgia in the family car driven by her son Bailey, with his wife and infant son in the passenger seat. The grandmother shared the back seat with her eight year old grandson, John Wesley, and granddaughter, June Star. She brought her cat, Pitty-Sing along hidden in a basket under her suitcase. The grandmother wanted to visit an old plantation so she created a story about a hidden treasure which made the

Symbols used to foreshadow their demise include the name of a town they pass through called “Toombsboro” (615) and the description of the Misfit’s car as a “big black battered hearse-like automobile” (617). Although the grandmother thinks she is a lady, the author paints a different picture personifying her as a snake. O’Connor quotes the grandmother as hissing when she asks June Star “Aren’t you ashamed?” (614). The grandmother is personified this way again when she reached out to touch the Misfit on the shoulder and he “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him” (622). The only time O’Connor depicts her in a positive light is when she is dead saying, “She half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed like a child and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (622). The image of a smiling child indicates to the reader that she has gone to