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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Essay

474 Words2 Pages

If a person is manipulative and their actions are paid for with people’s lives, would they be considered good? In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor the grandmother shows qualities that ask that question. Three reasons why are the following, she is manipulative, selfish, and fake. There is no good man or good woman in this story. The grandmother manipulates her son into going to an old plantation that she visited when she was young. She does this by saying to the kids “There was a secret panel in this house, she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing she were” (935). If there was a secret panel actually in the house that would be really cool, but there isn’t one. She says this so that the kids are interested. They whine and complain, begging their dad to go to the house. Eventually he decides to go to the house to get them to be quiet and quit complaining. The only reason the grandmother does this is because she wants to go to that house. Like mentioned in the last paragraph briefly, she is very selfish. The …show more content…

The only time she is religious is when she is threatened by death. She mentions Jesus and praying a lot at the end, saying “If you would pray, Jesus would help you” (940). Throughout the whole story she doesn’t mention her religion, but suddenly when she is facing death she suddenly becomes religious. If she would have acted like she did at the end of the story throughout the whole story, she would have been a good woman. She is a fake religious person, only believing when she might die. There are many good people in life, but the grandmother was not one of those. She was manipulative, selfish, and fake. People paying for someone else’s mistakes isn’t good. Her being manipulative and selfish cost her life and her whole families lives. Throughout this whole story there is neither a good man nor a good

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In a "Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O 'Connor, the contrast of good and evil is not as evident as it appears on the surface. The road that the family in the story travels symbolizes good up until the point the grandmother all but forces the family to make a detour onto a dirt road that leads to their demise. She is the unlikely antagonist in the story. A serial killer named, The Misfit, is the protagonist despite his homicidal actions. Both characters in the story help to illustrate how a relationship with God is perceived good and sacrilegious behavior is perceived evil.

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Once this confrontation happens, the grandmother first attempts to be saved for her impending fate was stating “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” (O’Connor pg. 208) and acting helpless by taking her handkerchief and wiping her eyes with it. This demonstrates to the reader just how desperate the grandmother is to escape and also displaying how she is willing to act so falsely to demonstrate to the misfit how much of a lady she is, when in reality she nothing but selfish and inconsiderate of others. The author starts to relay this repetition of the grandmother attempts to escape the misfit and also sets an atmosphere between the grandmother and misfit. One example of this is found when the misfit partners take bailey and Wesley away, the grandmother pretends to act devastated and cries out for baily but to the reader’s amusement the grandmother is looking at the misfit the whole time, almost trying to convince him about her lady like virtue of caring of family.

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Although it may seem like the grandmother is helping the family by trying to convince The Misfit that he is a good man, she is only doing it for “purely selfish reasons” (Mitchell). She has no reaction and is cold-hearted when her family members are murdered. Another reason why she is selfish is because of how she believes that she deserves special treatment because she is a “lady”. In the beginning of the story, O’Connor makes it a point to illustrate how lady-like the grandmother is dressed compared to the mother by stating that anyone who saw her “would know at once that she was a lady” (617). The grandmother wants to make it clear that she is a lady and has expectations to be treated like royalty solely because of her

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The Grandmother is the only member of the family still alive at this point. The misfit holds the grandmother at gunpoint. The grandmother uses faith as a way to escape death and pleads for the character to spare her life. “Pray!” The grandmother pleads pathetically.

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The balance of what is good and what is bad is a rather controversial topic in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find". Most notably, the characteristics of both the Grandmother and the Misfit. The Misfit portrays an immoral personality and seems to be the evil in the story while the grandmother is the innocent lady seeking to be the good in this story. However, the religious virtues effect both personas and in itself draws the line around them mutually as sinners. Both characters have a particular relationship with Jesus, a physical crisis crossed with a spiritual crisis and different conceptions of reality; thus, revealing how the portrayal of these characters are not what may seem.

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