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A Good Man Is Hard And Find

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Imagine being in a car with an annoying grandmother with two rude kids on each side. The grandmother is an odd person and the family is very quiet except the kids, the family goes on a trip and ends up into trouble. This happens in the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O 'Connor, David Sedaris 's “Us and Them” illustrates similar grotesque characters and suspicious moods. Both stories have sassy and rude characters. For instance, the grandmother, from “ A Good Man is Hard to Find” is being selfish by wanting to drive to East Tennessee. She had been making up excuses, like for example, “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is… headed toward Florida… I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like …show more content…

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” ,O’Connor displays The Misfit as a suspicious character. He is sneaky and cunning. In the scene where he talks to the family, he is not letting on what he is going to do, which displays a suspicious mood. For example, he says, “...but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me” (O’Connor 7). The grandmother is pleading for her life and asks if the Misfit will shoot her, he says, “I would hate to have to” (O’Connor 7) On the other hand, while David is spying on the Tomkeys, he thinks, “Because they had no TV, the Tomkeys were forced to talk during dinner. They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not ashamed that a camera would have found them uninteresting” (Sedaris 720). He is also setting a suspicious mood on what he is going to do next. His choices are to tell the Tomkeys that their lives were puny and insignificant or he can tell them nothing and be their friend. He is also a suspicious character because reader are unknowing of his plans. For example, he informs the reader,”It occurred to me that they needed a guide, someone who could accompany them through the course of an average day” (Sedaris 721). The reader does not know if he is going to point out all the thing the Tomkey children don’t know or if he is going to stay quiet and let them figure it out by themselves. In summary, there can be different types of moods,

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This week’s topic was very helpful to me because when I’m writing stories I found it challenging to create characters, I could never get a good grasp on how to make my characters “real”. In the text reading, I found that having a character with flaws leads to them being “real” or round and having a character who is perfect is leads to them not being real because no one is perfect not even a fictional character. I have always admired O’Connor work because her characterization is done very well. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the grandmother untrustworthy shines through when she constantly lies to her children and the people around. For example, in the text it states “She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking

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In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a story where the roles of good and evil blend together. In the short story, a family in the rural South gets caught up with a criminal named the Misfit after their wreck and they end up getting murdered. The clash between the grandmother and the Misfit highlights the religious aspects of the story and also O’Connor’s beliefs. Her stylistic traits of violence, distortion, and religion are used to convey a corrupt world that needs salvation. O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation.

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The misfit gains awareness of human morals when he kills the grandmother and he says, "She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O 'Connor 1020), he then realized that she wasn 't all that good. O 'Connor did a good job of interpreting the grandmother as a way to put away the values of the old Southern America; she also interprets the Misfit as a type of common man who is defiantly not perfect which can a realistic version of the new Southern America. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the irritating grandmother cares more about matters such as her appearance and manners, she dressed her best for the car ride and the reason for her doing this is so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady." (O 'Connor 1010). The grandmother is a very selfish woman, the first thing she said to the Misfit is "You wouldn 't shoot a lady, would you?"

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