A Good Man Is Hard To Find Irony Analysis

The Use of Irony in O’Connor’s Writing In the story of “A good man is hard to find,” written by Flannery O’Connor, an old, racist protagonist, two kids, a married couple, and their unnamed baby all go on a family vacation to Florida before dying brutally by a group of thugs on the way there. This short story features many humorous twists to the point of nearly being silly. Some examples of this are the how the family travels south instead of north, how the grandmother brings the cat to avoid a needless death, how the family non-fatally crashes their car, and how the family encounters the criminal they were trying to avoid all along. Countless instances of irony, a literary plot device, are found in O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

The family, instead of heading away from the danger, heads towards it to have a harmless family vacation (242). The only person against this action was the grandmother. Ironically not for safety reasons, but to get her way in seeing old connections in east Tennessee instead (242). Of course, the family heads to Florida anyway and faces dire consequences as a result (248-252). Speaking of dire consequences, the grandmother brings the cat, named Pitti Sing, on the trip to avoid its death (242). He quietly hides from the family inside a large suitcase. However, when the cat emerges after being kicked, the feline causes the family’s car to crash (247), which in turn causes the killers to be signaled the family’s way (248). This creates an outcome no one in the story was expecting, yet it still occurs anyway. The situation is a classic example of situational irony. During their last journey, death is foreshadowed since the family’s departure. How