A Good Man Is Hard To Find Character Analysis Essay

It is not an easy thing to see the world as you know it changing for the worse before your own eyes. The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor provides us with a look into the thoughts, actions, and beliefs of an elderly grandmother struggling to come to terms with the fact that the world she lives in now is not the same one she grew up in. In the story, we see an amoral, crazed murderer called the Misfit come to represent the deterioration of society. One character the family encounters during their misadventure even remarks when speaking about the Misfit "A good man is hard to find, Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more." (O’Connor 38).

While it may be natural to assume that the grandmother in the story is innocent and the tragedy at the end of the story was merely a hapless coincidence, a closer look into the grandmother's character reveals that her actions, motivated by her arrogant attitude and refusal to come to terms with the change are to blame for the tragical murder of her entire family.
The grandmother is constantly shown to possess a highly arrogant, judgemental, and egotistical attitude. One instance in which this is seen is in how the grandmother dressed for the trip, “the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a

For example, “ it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing,the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder. The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver’s seat with the cat-gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose-clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.” (O’Connor 39) The grandmother decided to sneak her cat along for the vacation without the knowledge or permission of anyone else in the family. The cat became loose and caused the car accident that left the family stranded in the Misfit’s path. If it weren’t for the grandmother arrogantly assuming that she could take her cat along with her, the tragedy at the end of the story would not have happened. Before this the grandmother deceived Bailey into taking a detour so that she could see some remnants of her earlier life. “She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. “There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were,