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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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"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 …show more content…

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

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The reason main reason for her death is because she decided to blurt out the name Misfit, which also would cost the life of her entire family. From the start of the story she makes decisions that she knows very well she should not make. Starting with her cat, had the grandmother not brought the cat along with her, this accident would not have taken place. Another time was when she lied when she really was lost. Another action that causes the grandmother to go through and unfortunate ending is when she claims that she would never allow for her children to go where a criminal like the misfit is on the loose, yet when they are confronted by the misfit she never once said for him spare her children or her family.

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In the story, the family takes a trip to Florida with a dangerous risk at hand. On the way, they turn down a dirt road with hopes of a fun experience, but instead run into the risk the grandmother was worried about all along, the murderer himself, the misfit. “God never made a

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“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is a short story written by Flannery O Connor, about a family that goes on vacation to Florida. The grandmother wants to visit Tennessee instead of going to Florida and she says that there is a criminal called The Misfit, loose in Florida. The set out to Florida in the car, the grandmother dresses as a lady just incase there is an accident. Bailey, her son drove the car and his wife and baby were in the front seat and the two children sat with grandmother at the back. In the car, grandma tells stories and the kids play games.

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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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She places too much trust into the Misfit believing the he “won’t shoot a lady, would you?” (7) because of the men’s gender roles: men are taught not to harm a lady. However, the grandmother disregards the injustice the Misfit experienced, which is the reason for her lack of logic when using gender roles as an argument. It is highly possible the Misfit is killing others so they can experience the unfairness he experienced. By conducting these misconducts such as murdering a family, he feels this as a compensation for what the American justice system had done to him.

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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-

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In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” written by Flannery O’Connor, the grandmother influences her family to take a detour on a trip to Florida to see a plantation in Georgia. This maneuver leads them down a dangerous road ending in a car accident. The “Misfit” and his partners appear after the accident and murder the entire family. The grandmother’s self-serving character defines this story: by manipulating everyone who becomes in her path, her air of superiority and judgmental approach.

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This leads to a foreshadowing in which overcomes a car crash later on in the story. The grandmother goes all dressed in nicely clothing in which foreshadows incase found dead. Not only she symbolizes what’s going to happen later on in the story but also prevents from saving her family.

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She tries coaxing him into this, saying things like, “Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady.” which shows no progress for getting to him. Like Fortunato, the grandmother, while sounding like a good person, was trying to get to The Misfit to let his guard down and allow her to escape rather than trying to get him to actually be a good person. Some may look at it as her trying to be a good person, while it can be taken as trying to save herself. Similar to this predicament is Tessie Hutchinson in “The Lottery,” who is also on death

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The religious values represented by her are that prayers and Jesus would help the sinner. These values are exposed in the course of the story in various situations. For example, the grandmother persuades her son not to go to Florida, and she feels that children should listen to their parents. She tries to convince the Misfit to pray so that he feels better. The Misfit means

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In Flannery O’Connor’s, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a grandmother and her family are going on a vacation to Florida, closer to the misfit that escaped. Before the family even gets in the car, the grandmother exhibits

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. In this particular story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor uses grotesque actions and themes to create a plot twist that leaves readers on the edge of their seats. Southern Gothic is a genre which focuses on damaged, delusional characters. Contrastingly, when someone thinks of a grandmother, it is usually of sweet remembrances from when she told stories or gave extra sweet foods before dinner. The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, which name remains unknown throughout the story, is portrayed as a manipulator and exceedingly puts her family in a life or death situation.

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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 was the one who surprises the reader because she tends to beg for her life while putting her family second. The importance of family throughout the whole trip was very important because they tend to stay together except the grandmother where she only cared for her survival. The theme of the story varies, because

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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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