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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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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). …show more content…

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

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248 Words | 1 Pages

A Good Man is Hard to Find: Response “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. ”-Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor’s (A Good Man is Hard to Find) is a great American Southern Gothic published in The Avon Book of Modern Writing, 1953. This type of Gothic writing was not popular at the time, however O’Connor thrived as a writer during this time, with her grotesques satire on poor and middle-class southern whites.

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872 Words | 4 Pages

In constructing irony the reader sees it as

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1493 Words | 6 Pages

The examples of irony listed above are only a few places in the book where irony is obviously present. Along with the instances already mentioned, there are also broader cases of irony in the novel that may not be so easily depicted. A dead and rotting body being hauled city to city for more than a week before it finally buried is humorous in itself. A youngster making holes in a coffin because he doesn’t truly understand that the person inside is dead also strikes the reader as comical. Furthermore, making a cast out of cement which ends up making the problem worse, and then busting off the cast with hammer and wedge is completely ironic and cannot help but encourage a good chuckle.

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856 Words | 4 Pages

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor utilizes symbolism to show how mankind's own selfish desires have blinded society from what is right and wrong. In the short story, O’Connor uses symbols to depict how two characters have caused lots of harm to a group of people because of their self-centered “moral” acts. Basing every decision on one's moral and self-consciousness only leads to the path of evil and darkness. In the story, O’Connor uses the Misfit to portray this type of person. Throughout the story, the sky is described as being empty and cloudless.

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688 Words | 3 Pages

When the family is on the trip, they pass a little black boy with no pants on, and the grandmother says, "little niggers in the country don't have things like we do" (398). This is just one instance where the grandmother shows how judgemental she is. She did not know anything about the boy or his family, but continued to talk bad about people who live in the country. After the wreck and being discovered by the Misfit, the grandmother knows she is in trouble and begins telling the Misfit

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490 Words | 2 Pages

Another example of this element irony being shown is when Oedipus runs away from the people he knew as parents, the king and queen of Cornith to escape the prophecy and ends up escaping to his real parents. The significance behind this is that he cannot

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670 Words | 3 Pages

O’Connor employs verbal, dramatic, and situational irony to emphasize the theme of what constitutes true goodness. Verbal irony is peppered throughout the dialogue, which is mainly carried by the protagonist. Afraid to die, the nameless Grandmother implores the antagonist to save her life by declaring the opposite of what she believes, namely that

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1371 Words | 6 Pages

In the 1953 short story titled “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, readers are given a glimpse of what the end of the story may look like through use of foreshadowing, symbolism, and other literary techniques. Although the story looks to be an innocent story of a family who travels to Florida for vacation at the start of it, readers soon find out that the story has a darker twist to it. This family trip turns violent and this gruesome ending can easily represent the violence taking place in America during the time this story was written by O’Connor and even today. The short story starts off with a family of six- parents, a grandmother, and three children-

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1080 Words | 5 Pages

In the story A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor uses the literary elements of characterization and foreshadowing to ask the reader what they would do in an impossible situation when given the choice between right and wrong and having the opportunity to change. The author wants the reader to see that during hard times people can choose to stick with their religion and faith to attempt to overcome the challenge or they could abandon it and live with the burden of the situation. O’Connor uses Grandmother’s sudden change of character to demonstrate to the readers that people have the ability to change for the better at any point in their lives. At the beginning of the story the Grandmother leaves the children’s mother unnamed because

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810 Words | 4 Pages

The Humanization of a Killer The grandmother portrays a good, religious woman, but in reality, she is just as bad as the person who kills her family. Throughout the novel, a family is on a trip to Florida, but a killer just escapes prison and is also going to Florida. On the drive down, the grandmother wants to show her family a plantation in Georgia, but she realizes that the plantation is in Tennessee, not Georgia. Their car crashes on a dirt road after the driver, the grandmother’s son, gets distracted.

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1150 Words | 5 Pages

The Grandmother “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story of Flannery O’Connor, and it is about a family which is going to Florida for a vacation, but instead ends up killed by prison runners whose names are the Misfit, Bobby Lee, and Hiram. The story mainly focused on the grandmother whose selfish behavior leads to a sudden tragic end for her family and herself at the end of the story. Even though Flannery O’Connor did not give the grandmother a name, she gave her a very interesting character, which has its own values. Throughout the story the grandmother is appears to value her status of a lady, her own desires and life, and religion. One of the values that is very important for the grandmother is being a lady.

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1093 Words | 5 Pages

Minor characters can play an important role in a story whether we see it at first glance or not. In the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, there are a few minor characters that have roles to direct an important message. This 1995 short story by O’Connor shows a family vacation that quickly meets a violent end by a criminal know as “The Misfit.” The little blonde, curly haired, sassy, bratty daughter, June Star, was often over looked, but she actually influenced the protagonists, the misfit and grandmother, during the story.

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1446 Words | 6 Pages

Irony is often used in literature to illustrate certain situations to the audience. In some pieces of literature that might be pointing out an unjust system, in others that might be to add a comedic effect, but whatever situation the author wants to illustrate, irony is very beneficial. Through small and witty, one-liners, or a bigger dramatic irony situation contrasting two very different situations, irony can be very beneficial for the reader to understand the story. Both “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins have a corrupt dystopian society. Through the use of irony, the author can portray the corruptness to the audience.

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686 Words | 3 Pages

One clear example of irony occurs when Laurie’s mother attends the PTA Meeting. For example “you must have your hands full in that kindergarten, with Charles.” Then the teacher states “Charles?” “We don't have any Charles in this kindergarten.” (Page 476)

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1338 Words | 6 Pages

Irony is defined as a technique that involves surprising, interesting, or amusing contradictions or contrasts (“A Glossary....” 1). The author talks about how Armand is getting rid of Desiree’s things as they are no longer together. He then discovers some letters that he concluded to be hers when he noticed one in the very back. He reads the letter and discovers that it was his mother writing to his father. The letter read, “… I thank God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (Chopin 5).

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