A Good Man Is Hard To Find Flannery O Connor Analysis

Many times when reading, whether it be a newspaper, magazine article, an essay or a piece of literature crafted by greats such as Harper Lee, George Orwell and J.K Rowling you may have the “temptation to speed up” (355); Only because you have “so much more reading ahead of you” (355), but on the contrary the author of What Words Can Tell Francine Prose explains that “In fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word”(355). It is very critical that you analyze everything you read because in order for you to fully understand the subject at hand you must pick every word apart and thoroughly understand the meaning of each word. Francine Prose does this by using a technique called “close reading”. Prose believes that “Close reading” is extremely important and shows us how this is done by explaining a

Francine Prose explains how this is done by showing us an example of her personally analyzing the first paragraph of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. She begins her close reading session by looking at the first sentence of this story. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”. She explains that although this sentence is rather “plain” there is still a lot contained in those eight little words. After she begins to make connections with how other people write because again making connections is a crucial part to close reading. She speaks about how the author could have used a first name, last name, an Mrs. That he had a lot of different choices he could of made but decided to merely “reducing her to her role in the family as does the fact that her daughter in law is never called anything but the children’s mother.” (356). Prose then generates another idea from reading the first sentence which is the fact that “the first sentence is a refusal which in very simplicity, emphasizes the force with which the old woman is digging in her