A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor is a short story that portrays a family's vacation to Florida that is quickly turned into a nightmare when they meet with the Misfit, a convict who escaped from prison. O'Connor made use of irony through her characters to symbolize a concept of class-consciousness. When reading the story, the grandmother is depicted as a woman who is upright and have Christian values but as you keep reading the story the author shines light on other issues the grandmother has. She seems to act as if she is “better” than others and the people she encounters. Although now she has a family of her own, she criticizes her son Baily and how he raises his kids and says “In my time children were more respectful of

The entirety of the story is based upon the irony that the grandmother did not want to go to Florida because she knew about the misfit escaping, therefore it would be making her and her family a target, but she herself ultimately leads them right to the misfit. The grandmother constant need to be morally good is what subsequently get her killed in the end. This also refers back to the theme of the story, no one is good and perfect. Everyone makes mistakes and there are no degrees to morality. The story shows that being good for your own selfish reasons can have deathly consequences. The grandmother actions show that there is a difference between genuine and selfish. In all she has no real sense of “goodness” and doesn’t know the true meaning of the word, she treats it as a word to make herself feel better by also making the people she cares most for feel bad. Although the grandmother is not aware of her own selfishness, it backfires in her last moments of life when the misfit says “she could have been a good woman”, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”. Meaning when the grandmother is threated by dying she is essentially enlightened by her past mistakes and how she treated others around her. Having lost all of her family and is faced with death herself, the grandmother appears to experience a sudden change and she reaches out to the same