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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

810 Words4 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. The Misfit, the killer, and his minions see the crash and go over to the family. The grandmother recognizes the killer and tries to save herself which causes the Misfit to kill her and her entire family. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” …show more content…

The grandmother wants to convince the killer he is an acceptable person: “You shouldn’t call yourself the Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell” (O’Connor). The grandmother feels that she knows the Misfit is a righteous person by the way he looks, but he is a killer and not a good person. The grandmother's sins are her selfishness and pride. The Misfit has a lot of sins including killing numerous different people: “The Misfit is troubled by the evil in the world even though he is a contributor. He more likely represents one more troubled soul on earth that lacks religion” (Bouchard 83). The Misfit is not a good person and needs saving. Even though the grandmother cares about her religion, she will do anything to keep herself alive even through sins. The grandmother commits sins throughout the story, and one of her sins is …show more content…

Like many others, the grandmother wants to survive. She uses the wrong method of trying to save herself: “I just know you’re a good man” (O’Connor). She wants to persuade the killer not to kill her. As the grandmother tries to assure the killer that he’s an upright person: “One of the men takes Bailey and two of the children into the woods, and the grandmother tries to convince the Misfit that he is a good person” (Smith 205). The grandmother wants to live, so she wants the Misfit to think he isn’t the person he thinks he is. She wants him to pray, so he can understand he is an upright person. The grandmother tries to convince the killer that he is an upstanding man; she humanizes him into thinking what she wants him to think. Even though the grandmother dies, she still uses her skills to try to stay

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Unfortunately, since Misfit didn’t have any proof he therefore lives his life by his own moral code. This contradicts the grandmother because the grandmother claimed to be very religious and tried to show that to Misfit. On page 230, line 110, of LIT by Kirszner & Mandell, the grandmother says, “Pray, pray, pray, pray…” She wanted Misfit to pray with her but he doesn’t end up doing that since he isn’t religious. In the end, the grandmother’s faith had faltered right before she was about to be murdered.

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So, when reading the story initially I was left with the impression that The Misfit was least sympathetic because he just killed an entire family forcing the grandmother to come to terms with their death before killing her off. As blunt and brutal as this situation is, it is also the most symbolic as the true villain of Poe's story is actually the grandmother. For instance, the grandmother constantly insists that The Misfit must be a good man, "I know you're a good man" (O' Connor 504) and "I just know you're a good man" (O'Connor 505). Moreover, instances of the grandmother claiming that if The Misfit pray, Jesus will guide him, while she herself never does it and simply goes on to say in a cursing manner, "Jesus, Jesus" (O'Connor 507) insinuating The Misfit needs the saving. O'Connor cleverly implies this as the grandmother being sympathizing with his past, all the while her tone is almost becoming forcing, as a means of psychological attack.

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Although it may seem like the grandmother is helping the family by trying to convince The Misfit that he is a good man, she is only doing it for “purely selfish reasons” (Mitchell). She has no reaction and is cold-hearted when her family members are murdered. Another reason why she is selfish is because of how she believes that she deserves special treatment because she is a “lady”. In the beginning of the story, O’Connor makes it a point to illustrate how lady-like the grandmother is dressed compared to the mother by stating that anyone who saw her “would know at once that she was a lady” (617). The grandmother wants to make it clear that she is a lady and has expectations to be treated like royalty solely because of her

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In this moment, the grandmother realizes that she has a commonality with the Misfit, and that they both truly do have some good in them. Her observation that his face was momentarily like hers causes her to see the emotion that the Misfit is experiencing, and she makes the connection between his emotion and hers. She finally is transformed by this realization and her own actions of kindness, as she died and “her face [smiled] up at the cloudless sky” (212). The goodness that the grandmother had been seeking throughout the entire story had at last been realized through her own actions of kindness toward the Misfit, who was also momentarily affected and taken back by her grace towards

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One of the Misfit's partners says, "She was a talker, wasn't she?" (409) and the Misfit replies saying, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (409). This dialogue should easily convince any reader that the grandmother was the real villain in the story and was the main reason the entire family was

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This ending is ironic considering that the grandmother never makes any reference to being religious before facing death. Also, she continuously reminds the Misfit of the fact that she is a lady in the hopes that it will have the same meaning to him as it does to her. However, not once does she try to spare the rest of her family. She is too busy groveling for her own life to give her family a second thought, even after the first gunshots have gone off. In the face of death, the grandmother constantly tries to convince the Misfit that he is a good man, even after he has ordered his men to kill her family, and presumably many others.

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The Grandmother is the only member of the family still alive at this point. The misfit holds the grandmother at gunpoint. The grandmother uses faith as a way to escape death and pleads for the character to spare her life. “Pray!” The grandmother pleads pathetically.

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The Misfit knows who he is and does not pretend to be otherwise, unlike the old lady. With a show of unpretentiousness, he clearly states, “Nome, I ain’t a good man” (O’Connor 427). In the end, the antagonist enlightens the Grandmother with his brutal honesty, and her “head cleared for an instance” (O’Connor 430). In the final moments of her life, she is able to drop all pretenses and view evil in the form of the Misfit as something she can accept within herself by exclaiming, “Why you’re one of my babies” (O’Connor 430). Ironically, at the moment she reaches out to him, he kills her.

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When faced with death, “to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed”, (Gunner 10). After the death of her son, Bailey, the grandmother begs The Misfit to pray for Jesus’s help. By calling The Misfit one of her own children, right before she is shot three times through the chest, she identifies him as a human capable of being saved by God’s Grace. The Misfit achieves grace when he ends the story explaining that, “It’s no real pleasure in life” to take away another’s life after previously having to have claimed the only pleasure in life being meanness (O’Conner

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She is only trying to convince the misfit that he is a good man because she wants to be freed, and her life is in shambles. Also, the grandmother has already gone back on her word multiple of times, calling the misfit a big, bad, and scary man. Now all of the sudden he is a good man. Therefore, the grandmother still has not changed a

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The story opens with a man named Bailey who is going on a trip with his family to Florida. However, his mother had other plans and becomes the "manipulative grandmother lecturing her apathetic son" (Sparrow). At first she tries to convince her son to change the trip destination saying ""(O 'Connor). It might be inferred that she meant well by warning Bailey about the prison escapee traveling in the same direction. Unfortunately, later in the story the reader finds out that .

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The grandmother uses Jesus as a scapegoat to show how she is a child of God while the Misfit tells of how he really perceives Jesus and that there is no justification of his actions. In the event of the car accident, the Grandmother was left with a physical crisis that quickly showed as her family was sent off into the woods to be killed one by one. This soon transitioned to a spiritual crisis both between the Grandmother and the Misfit as she uses Jesus's name to try and escape her fate. This spiritual crisis leads the characters to express their personal conception of reality and how they perceive the revelation of the situation that they are in. The Grandmother has a sense that reality should revolve around her and that she should manipulate tools such as religion to benefit her outcome.

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The grandmother grew in that moment of death more than she ever did in the little parts that we read about her life, and she dies in peace. Her actions may have even changed the Misfit too. At the end, he says “she would have been a good woman if he 'd been there all her life to shoot her.” (366). This line confused me the first time reading it, but the second time around it made more sense.

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These events are easily found in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" because the violence takes place casually at the end of the story, the murderer doesn 't try to be sneaky about it. At the beginning of the story the grandmother talks the family into visiting east Tennessee and not Florida by telling them that a dangerous inmate named "The Misfit" had escaped and is headed to Florida; "The Misfit is aloose from the federal Pen headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn 't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn 't answer to my conscience if it did."

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Before her death, Grandma tries to persuade Misfit to change his ways: “‘pray, pray,’ the grandmother began, ‘pray, pray…” Her life is coming to an end, but within that little time she tells her murderer to pray. After she is murdered, O’Connor writes that she is laying “in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” Her miraculous faith in God is displayed by the beautic smile on her face. Even though her offer of reclamation was denied by Misfit, she finds reconciliation by traveling up to the heaven gates. Furthermore, there is a glimpse of grace when Misfit left the murder scene.

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