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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Setting Analysis

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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor create very different atmospheres through their use of the elements of point of view and title. The first person point of view of As I Lay Dying creates a tragic atmosphere because its multiple narrators give a personal and unadulterated perspective of the story. On the contrary, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” creates a cynical and critical atmosphere through its dehumanizing narrator. Similarly, its title adds to the critical atmosphere of the work by commenting on the savage nature of humans. In a similar way, the morbid title of As I Lay Dying displays the tragic nature of the work as a whole. The tragic atmosphere of As I Lay Dying and the critical atmosphere of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are exemplified by the points of view and titles of both works. The points of view of As I Lay Dying and “A Good Man is Hard to …show more content…

A prominent motif of the work is death; it is also featured in the title of the novel. The fact that this motif is present in the title contributes to the tragic atmosphere of the work because it sets up the novel to discuss mortality. Likewise, the title of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” catalyzes the short story’s cynical atmosphere. It does so by analyzing the nature of humans with a comment which is similar to those which the story presents. Both As I Lay Dying and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” have atmospheres which are exemplified by their titles. The points of view and titles of As I Lay Dying and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” contribute to the atmospheres of their works. As I Lay Dying creates a tragic atmosphere though the use of multiple first person narrators and its bleak title. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” presents its critical atmosphere with the aid of its third person limited narrator and its cynical title. Both works utilize their points of view and titles to create their

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Character Analysis in As I Lay Dying As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner has remained a fairly controversial and intriguing novel when it comes to analysis. It’s “stream of consciousness” style, extensive amount of narrators, and fragmented format leave much available for differing analysis. With the overwhelming amount of narrators comes several pivotal characters. In turn, investigating characterization becomes a popular form of analysis for this work.

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Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was published in 1955. O’Connor was also known for her novel The Violent Bear it Away (published in 1960) and her collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge (published in 1964). The author often used violence and greed to show how she saw humanity that was without God. She liked to write about pettiness and vanity in the rural south, both of which play large parts in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” This particular piece of work is about a family who goes on a road trip that takes an unexpected turn when they cross paths with a murderer and his henchmen.

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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner follows the Bundren family on their arduous journey to fulfill their dying mother's wish: to be buried with her family. Faulkner utilizes fifteen narrators, including Vardaman, the confused child, Addie, the dying mother, and objective characters such as the Tull family, to recount the details of the family's quest. Although death is a meaningful and somber topic, Faulkner reveals his opinion that death is an escape from the difficulties of life. Despite this grim subject matter, Faulkner uses irony and humor to effectively turn the novel into a dark comedy. Faulkner illustrates this dark humor through Addie's anticipation of her death, Anse's blatant ignorance toward his dying wife, and Vardaman's amusing confusion about death.

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In the novel, As I lay dying by William Faulkner, the Bundren family go through a mental journey of loss and death of their mother later to go on a physical journey to bury their mother. To the conclusion of any novel, many have an opinion on what is much happy or not a happy ending. In the case of the ending to As I lay dying, include no real burial of how the mother wanted, which was the point of the physical journey in the first place, secrets comes out, one of the five the siblings gets taken away, and many are left with unfinished business, was not a happy at all for most of the characters. The novel is narrated by 15 characters that are not all part of the Bundren family but in some way connected.

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In enduring these complex emotions, this section was the most remarkable part. One of the first apparent emotions the boy experiences with the death of his father is loneliness to make this section memorable. The boy expresses this sentiment when he stays with his father described as, “When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again,” (McCarthy 281). The definition of loneliness is, “sadness because one has no friends or company.”

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In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the author, Flannery O 'Connor, demonstrates how a short story can contain many aspects of feminism without one even noticing. Looking at the short story through a feminist point of view, one can quickly gather that O’Connor uses the old school gender roles from the very beginning of the short story. As reading the title, it automatically suggests the male characters in this short story are untrustworthy, not prevalent, and dangerous. With that being said, the female characters in this story are viewed in the eyes of how a woman should act.

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In her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor introduces the reader to a world of family issues, danger, and murder. The story was written in 1955 during a period of social and racial unrest in the southern United States. Mostly, the story follows O 'Connor 's basic Southern Gothic writing style. A work that is "cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent" (Galloway). While the quote gives major insight into the theme of the story, it does not offer a glimpse into O 'Connor 's real message of the story.

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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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