ipl-logo

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

700 Words3 Pages

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 …show more content…

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

Show More
Related
688 Words | 3 Pages

In the story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor, there is no doubt the reader should consider the grandmother a villain. Throughout the story, it is easy to assume the grandmother would eventually lead the family to some sort of downfall. The grandmother has many traits that make her a villain, and through her judgemental nature, selfish acts, and inability to stop talking, she leads her family and herself to their death. Throughout the story it is obvious that the grandmother is very judgemental of people and seems to consider herself as better than everyone.

Read More
1150 Words | 5 Pages

Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist and short story writer. A woman once said of O’Connor after a reading of one of her stories, “It's a shame that someone with so much talent would look upon life as a horror show.” While this quote may hold some truth, Flannery O'Connor skillfully establishes complex characters of realism to illustrate the theme of negative yet natural humans naturally displayed throughout life. O'Connor crafts writing using calculated foreshadowing and symbolism to guild the reader to the theme. In the story A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor uses a graveyard to foreshadow the end of the story.

Read More
1142 Words | 5 Pages

Her final act towards the Misfit was not out of charity, but in attempt to save herself. Set in the South in the 1950s, the grandmother dutily satisfied the stereotypes that blossomed within her generation. She speaks of the older days, when children were more respectful, and good men were easier to find. However, she never expresses what defines a good man, which suggests her unsteady moral foundation. The grandmother also explicitly articulates the racism that was unfortunately common in the South, ironically prevalent in the religious and upper middle class circles like the ones she belonged to.

Read More
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-

Read More
1097 Words | 5 Pages

The grotesque psychopathic nature of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” ironically shows how a good man does not truly exist through the revelation and proclamation of what characteristics a good man possess. In the story The Misfit shows characteristics of a psychopath by escaping prison and killing an innocent family. However, The Misfit isn’t the only character in the short story to show psychopathic tendencies. The grandma also shows some characteristics of a psychopath because she does not care or show remorse for her family who was brutally murdered

Read More
965 Words | 4 Pages

She put her imperfect characters in often times disturbing conditions. Her writing delved into religion and the morality of her characters when such situations arose. O’Connor brilliantly uses dark twists and foreshadowing to give her stories an additional appeal. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the story opens with the grandmother not wanting to go to Florida on account of the fact that a murderer had escaped and was on the loose(361). This exemplifies O’Connor’s proficient use of foreshadowing.

Read More
1583 Words | 7 Pages

In this quote, the reader could tell that O’Connor carefully planned the family's deaths. The events that happened in the story leading towards the ending, all hinted toward a tragedy to come. The foreshadowing in the story gave the ending away but she made it very hard to find. For example, O’Connor introduced the Misfit very early in the story making him

Read More
1208 Words | 5 Pages

Viewing The Misfit as a tragic figure, we sympathize with his actions and feel remorse for who he has become. The readers see him as a victim and sympathize for his actions, including killing the elderly Grandmother. Although he is an awful person, because he is a male character, it is acceptable for him to have issues, but it is not acceptable for a woman to have any sort of issue. As the Misfits says, “She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor), this suggests that the Grandmother was an awfully annoying woman, but if she had a man there to keep her in line, she would have been a decent

Read More
1559 Words | 7 Pages

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, the author portrays the grandmother as self-centered, dishonest and prideful woman. The grandmother is an old, southern, Caucasian woman who describes herself as a good woman. Throughout the story, O’Connor shows how the grandmother’s pride, and selfishness leads her to unappreciated her family. She does not care about them, she only cares about herself and what will benefit her. The grandmother’s selfishness, judgmental actions, dishonesty put the family in danger.

Read More
1076 Words | 5 Pages

Even her young grandchildren acknowledge that their Grandmother is unabashedly nosy when they comment: “She wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks… afraid she’d miss something” (O’Connor Good Man 284). The children don’t seem to be extremely fond of her; most likely because of the condescending way she often speaks to them. When they are driving through Georgia, John Wesley makes a disparaging comment about their home state, and the Grandmother responds haughtily saying, “If I were a little boy, I wouldn’t talk about my native state that way” (O’Connor Good Man 285). Despite all this, she still views herself as a good and fine woman. When talking to the man at the restaurant where the family stops for lunch, she remarks, “People are certainly not nice like they used to be” (O’Connor Good Man 287).

Read More
1274 Words | 6 Pages

In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the author, Flannery O 'Connor, demonstrates how a short story can contain many aspects of feminism without one even noticing. Looking at the short story through a feminist point of view, one can quickly gather that O’Connor uses the old school gender roles from the very beginning of the short story. As reading the title, it automatically suggests the male characters in this short story are untrustworthy, not prevalent, and dangerous. With that being said, the female characters in this story are viewed in the eyes of how a woman should act.

Read More
1016 Words | 5 Pages

The Misfit 's mind is one of the most complicated of any villain in O 'Connor’s stories and in all literature. His mental state is most evident in "the scene between the Grandmother and the Misfit at the climax of the story" (Walls 3) This recent escapee 's psyche can be described as "tails short of the athlete’s morality, for he plays by no one 's rules except his own" (Fike). This mental state is typical of most criminals but the Misfit’s perception on religion is not so conventional. Usually, when a person commits a heinous act and if the person is spiritual they will say God told them to do it.

Read More
1393 Words | 6 Pages

Moreover, when the Misfit and the two men shoot the whole family in the woods, it illustrates the sinister and cruel world that needs saving. The violent car crash that causes the family to encounter the Misfit in the first place adds to the violent display that O’Connor creates of the world. O’Connor uses the violence in the story to shock the readers into self-awareness (Larson 1). She uses this self-awareness to bring to light the religious theme of redemption and grace for the corrupted. O’Connor’s

Read More
1743 Words | 7 Pages

The Role of Family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O’Connor is a short story that brings out mystery and cruelty. Manipulation plays a big role in this story by the grandmother. She tends to manipulate her family and tends to get her way by playing with them. Although the author wanted to give many perspectives of the grandmother, we as reader got our own views of her.

Read More
1254 Words | 6 Pages

In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she uses writing skills such as symbolism and imagery to get across her different themes to the reader’s with plenty of room for self-interpretation. Though O’Connor’s work could be defined as cynical, she does an excellent job of writing in the third person with her uncomplicated structure of sentences leaving plenty of room for her character 's thoughts, feelings, and actions to get across the realism of our world. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a battle between a grandmother with a rather artificial sense of goodness, and a criminal who symbolizes evil. The grandmother treats goodness as having good manners, and coming from a family of higher class, but at the end of the story comes to

Read More

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

Related Topics

Open Document