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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

904 Words4 Pages

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, she address the themes of morality, innocence, and religion. The characters in this piece of literature are portrayed as good, bad, or an undecided mixture of both. O’Connor explores the way that people are perceived and how that compares to how they perceive themselves. In the short story, this idea of perception is enforced by the weak religious ideas of the Grandmother and society’s judgements of The Misfit. Through the contrast of their different roles during their interaction, she is able to delve into the concepts of human introspection and devoutness. In this short story, the two main characters who meet and have a life altering encounter are the Grandmother and The Misfit. …show more content…

For example, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the Grandmother sees herself as an innocent woman, but through her actions show the reader that she is highly capable of indecent actions such as lying, disregard for her family’s safety, and manipulation. Compared to The Misfit, she isn’t as aware of her moral shortcomings and deceptive actions. The Misfit is more introspective and reflective on his past mistakes, while the Grandmother ignores her self-serving nature. The Misfit looks back on his past a few times during his interaction with the grandmother, speaking about it in ways like this: “I was never a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, “but somewhere along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.” (O’Connor 417). In society, The Misfit is considered a criminal and a deviant, while the Grandmother would be perceived as an innocent, old woman. When looking at both of the characters actions one might say that The Misfit is more morally wrong than the Grandmother because he kills her in the end, however, the Grandmother is consistently manipulative and self-serving to the point of indirectly killing her family.

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After reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I was inspired to do more research on Flannery O’Connor. The two short stories we have had to read in the past week, have been my first encounter with her works. I was aware that she was a Christian writer, so I was not surprised when I saw that we would be reading her. However, she has surprised me quite a bit through her writing. I found it interesting that O’Connor spent much of her life in Georgia.

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In her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor tackles the issue of grace, showing that no matter the person, everyone can attain and earn grace. The grandmother and the Misfit, though they appear to be quite different people, are both the same at the core: They are sinners in need of Christ. The Misfit and the grandmother are both capable of change and accepting God, but only the grandmother reaches this revelation before her death. Grace is one of the most important ideas in the Bible and Christianity. Grace is “the love of God shown to the unlovely; the peace of God given to the restless; the unmerited favor of God,” (Holcomb).

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The presence of The Misfit sums many things up nicely despite the fact that he seems an impossible source to look to for profound or moral direction, however he shows a profound conviction that other lack characters or are left wanting. Not at all like the grandma, who essentially believes that she is ethically better than every other person, the Misfit truly addresses the significance of life and his part in it. He has precisely considered his activities throughout everyday life and analyzed his encounters to discover lessons inside them. This is a superb case which underpins my hypothesis of the grandma and her condition. In light of the fact that the Misfit is a perceptual portrayal of all that she isn't however at last from multiple points

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In the story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by ‎Flannery O'Connor, the Grandmother in the story is known as the protagonist. Although this is the case, throughout the story the audience learns that she is actually a born sinner just like the Misfit. Even though the Misfit’s actions are worse than that of the Grandmother’s actions, they both commit sins of more or less value to that of one another. One of the biggest mistakes the Grandmother makes in this story is to choose treat God as somebody she can accept or ignore depending upon the situation that she is put in. Although the Grandmother is a naturally born sinner, she is saved by grace towards the end of the story.

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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

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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

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I sympathize the least with The Misfit. In the story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" written by Flannery O'Connor. The Misfit is the antagonist when he shoots the family traveling in the middle of the night. From his actions, he reveals that he is a want to equate the Misfit esociopath, with possible narcissistic personality traits. The Misfit seems like a kind man in the south when approaching them, but then the family sees the guns and get nervous.

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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.

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Redemption is the act of being saved from acts of evil and sin. The debate of whether human nature is redeemable or not has been one to plaque religious scholars. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, this question continues in the interactions between the characters; the most notable being the Grandmother of a rather horrible family and the Misfit, a murderer. While on a road trip, these two characters’ paths collide and lead to a rather unfortunate end where the Grandmother and her family are killed. While many readers believe the ending creates and overall negative tone of the story, some believe that there is a hope for redemption; the story’s author O’Connor who is a devoted Catholic included.

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In her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor introduces the reader to a world of family issues, danger, and murder. The story was written in 1955 during a period of social and racial unrest in the southern United States. Mostly, the story follows O 'Connor 's basic Southern Gothic writing style. A work that is "cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent" (Galloway). While the quote gives major insight into the theme of the story, it does not offer a glimpse into O 'Connor 's real message of the story.

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In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a story where the roles of good and evil blend together. In the short story, a family in the rural South gets caught up with a criminal named the Misfit after their wreck and they end up getting murdered. The clash between the grandmother and the Misfit highlights the religious aspects of the story and also O’Connor’s beliefs. Her stylistic traits of violence, distortion, and religion are used to convey a corrupt world that needs salvation. O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation.

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The reality between the Misfit and the Grandmother are very different and from this viewpoint it seems as if the Grandmother is a more dishonest and unfaithful person when it comes to selfishness. The Misfit does not express selfishness, rather he equally treats himself as he would with the people that he murdered. With two distinct differences in reality, both show similar signs of

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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.

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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

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The misfit gains awareness of human morals when he kills the grandmother and he says, "She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O 'Connor 1020), he then realized that she wasn 't all that good. O 'Connor did a good job of interpreting the grandmother as a way to put away the values of the old Southern America; she also interprets the Misfit as a type of common man who is defiantly not perfect which can a realistic version of the new Southern America. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the irritating grandmother cares more about matters such as her appearance and manners, she dressed her best for the car ride and the reason for her doing this is so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady." (O 'Connor 1010). The grandmother is a very selfish woman, the first thing she said to the Misfit is "You wouldn 't shoot a lady, would you?"

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