A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Cathedral Analysis

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What if someone unexpected changed your way of thinking, permanently? What if God chose to send someone into your life to abolish you superficial thoughts? In both the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Connor, and “Cathedral”, by Raymond Carver, the authors create main characters who lack faith and think superficially about life. However, in both stories, the authors send unexpected characters to act like mediums, for their job is to be the connection of the main character’s initial position in faith and their final position, revealed at the end of both stories. Even though the stories have a different plot and involve diverse kinds of characters, the final message and moral is the same. In the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Cathedral”, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver use unexpected figures and characters as a way to change the main character’s personality and thoughts. In both stories, the authors create characters that are introduced in order to change the main character’s thoughts. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, …show more content…

When relating both stories, it is evident that the changes occur in a way that makes the main characters be a step closer to God, or even to make their faith more effervescent. In the case of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the grandmother dies like Jesus died, in the same position, and even though the change occurred a bit too late for her, according to the text, she was purified, and this becomes evident due to the pool of blood that she laid upon. This is because blood, which is red, stands for bad things. In the case of “Cathedral”, the author chooses to purify the main character by making him see further into his soul, and further into the meaning of aspects in life, instead of having superficial eyes. This said, both authors, even though creating different contexts, emphasize the same element in their