A Good Man Is Hard To Find Rhetorical Analysis

In her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor is brutally honest in confronting her audience, which presumably differs from her staunch Catholic point of view. Using elements of distortion and exaggeration, O’Connor points out the atrocities of the world she and her audience live in—America in the 1950s and 60s. Racial tensions and political decisions proved divisive, corrupting and splitting America. O’Connor believes that her audience was part of the self-righteous, judgmental, and morally corrupt divisions of America—divisions embodied by the main character: the grandmother. O’Connor writes with great conviction to convey the idea that even the most unlikely of people, including those with great obstacles to salvation,

It is obvious that the grandmother is a manipulator, and this idea is carried into her dialogue with the Misfit, in which she suggests to the Misfit that he “wouldn’t shoot a lady” (86). The grandmother attempts to manipulate him by questioning his morals, contending that any proper, Southern man “wouldn’t shoot a lady.” O’Connor uses the grandmother’s words to reveal one of her major obstacles to salvation: self-centeredness. The grandmother is clearly self-centered, as she only inquires about her own welfare and not her family’s. When the grandmother agreed with Red Sammy’s claim that “[a] good man is hard to find,” she portrayed herself (and Red Sammy) as superficial and arrogant, acting as if there are no good men or women like them in the world (43). The grandmother never took the time to truly think about what she believed in, especially religiously. Her beliefs are not deep or complex in any manner, and . When she says that the Misfit is a “good man” and that he doesn’t “look a bit like [he has] common blood,” the grandmother’s belief that such an evil person is a “good man” appears superficial (88). The grandmother insinuates that because she is a “lady” and the Misfit is a “good man” not of “common blood,” the Misfit would not actually shoot her, which O’Connor uses to accentuate the grandmother’s arrogance and

The grandmother’s moment of grace begins when she sees the Misfit breaking down like a child would. Previously, O’Connor showed that the Misfit “didn’t have on any shirt” and “his ankles were red and thin” through the grandmother’s eyes (72 and 74). The grandmother saw the Misfit as vulnerable, and now, the Misfit seems “as if he were going to cry” (136). The Misfit has an emotional breakdown, and “his voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant” (136). O’Connor depicts the Misfit as vulnerable and connects him with the grandmother’s son, Bailey, by clothing him in Bailey’s “yellow shirt with bright blue parrots” in order to make the Misfit seem like the grandmother’s own helpless child, opening her heart and eliciting compassion from the grandmother for the Misfit (122). With this mentality, the grandmother literally reaches out to the Misfit as if “[he was] one of [her] own children” (136). The Misfit looks so much like the grandmother’s own son that she is finally able to find it in her heart to love the man who just killed her whole family, just like Jesus would have done. The Misfit picks up on her compassion and right as she