A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor is a short story that expresses the many different literary devices. The ones that appear throughout are symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. O’Connor shows how there is always more to the words that are spoken than just what the ear allows to be heard. Through these devices, O’Connor reveals to the reader the deeper meaning behind the words and how the words express grace that then leads to salvation. O’Connor really tests the audience’s focus with her symbolism techniques because she makes the reader have to find the truth and go beyond the text. A symbol that occurs throughout the whole story, and also helps to back-up the theme are the “two characters, the Grandmother and The Misfit’ (Bandy).

In addition to the examples of the Grandmother foreshadowing, she reveals to the readers how irony plays a role too by insisting how “the modern world lacks moral virtues” (Rea). By saying this, she means to compare her generation to her grandchildren’s. She points out to them that “her generation ‘did right’ by respecting ancestors and origins” (Rea), but The Misfit is also from the Grandmother’s generation. This is ironic because she’s going back on her own words of saying her generation did right. In another ironic aspect of the short story, the Grandmother always claims that she knows the ways of the world and even how fate works. The irony is clear to the reader here because she thinks that the family is going on a nice vacation, but “the grandmother’s fate does not arrive from the outside but rather emerges from within,” (Gresham). The Grandmother’s fate gets mixed up with “the ruins of her past and her faulty memory” (Gresham) because she wants to have the perfect family life, but the reader can see the irony within her family. One other example that O’Connor evokes for the reader to see the irony is whenever June says after the wreck, “but nobody’s killed” (O’Connor). The irony here is straightforward because it is understandable to the reader that they all do die at the