A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Mary Flannery O Connor

Mary Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, is a captivating story that starts out with a family taking an innocent trip to Florida that ultimately costs them their lives. The main character in O’Connor’s story is the Grandmother, a woman who dresses up for a car ride “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (Flannery 250). The irony of her statement is that the grandmother is no lady at all. O’Connor’s story is riddled with irony that starts with the title “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and ends with “The Misfit” firing three shots into the grandmother’s chest.
O’Connor’s story leads with the ironic title “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Throughout the story, O’Connor describes the awful things that the grandmother does, and at the same time, has her (the grandmother) proclaiming that a good man is hard to find. J.T. Bushnell, when describing the grandmother quips “the most important characters are a grating, manipulative, racist grandmother and a serial killer…” (Bushnell) From the beginning of O’Connor’s story, she shows the grandmother’s

The Misfit has the entire family killed until the grandmother is the only one still alive. During the entire story, the grandmother refers to herself as a lady. It’s not until The Misfit is about to kill her that she has a revelation that she may not be all that she has thought . The Misfit himself notices this when he exclaims “She would have been a good woman,” (Flannery 261) and “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (Flannery 261). Judith Wynne thinks that “O’Connor’s irony can be seen as sacramental, not because it works with the stuff of religious belief and non-belief, which it does, but because it itself operates as a vehicle of revelation (Wynne). This revelation immediately before her death is O’Connor’s irony at its