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Character Analysis: A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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“A Good Man is Hard to Find” In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor indicates the main character the grandmother and her southern family taking a vacation to Florida, even though the grandmother would rather go to Tennessee. The real journey takes place inside the family's lives. One question that comes up in the story is what the definition of a good man is and how there is so few of them left in the world. Many of the characters in the story think of themselves as good people based on moral choices. In this novel "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", O'Connor, will show you that the grandmother keeps mentioning how there are no good people out in the world like before, no matter how nice you are when it comes down to evil people, you can not run from death. A Grandmother, living with her son and his family, appears to be a manipulative and deceitful old woman. As her family decides to take a vacation drive to Florida, she tells her son Bailey that they should head down to Tennessee instead. Due to the fact that there is a criminal “The Misfit” and two other fugitives on the loose who have escaped prison and she wants to visit some of her old connections. She gets ready to head with them even though she's not invited. While on the road the children John Wesley, and …show more content…

He eventually realized that it doesn't matter what crime one commits; "sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.” (O’Connor 293) As a result, he thinks that one might as well do bad, if one is going to be punished whether one does bad or not "'No pleasure but meanness,'" he says. The Misfit sees the disconnect between the grandmother's values and his own. He's been mistreated and condemned, his life ruined, and he recognizes she’s trying to manipulate him by making it seem as though they have some values in

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In "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O’Connor is about a family going to Florida, but there will be lesson that they will learn is their personal lives. One main thought that surfaces in the story is how there is so few of good men left in the world and how does a decent man treat others. The characters in the story see themselves as incredible people in light of moral codes that they stay by. These ethical codes are significantly flawed regardless, leaving each character blinded by their own particular gaudiness. O'Connor shows the character of the Misfit, an escaped executioner.

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Vivien Thomas was a good man. He helped save lives of tiny children. He helped save a one year old Eileen Saxon. Eileen was a blue baby. And Vivien helped save blue babies.

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Not Your Average Grandmother (A Character Analysis from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) The first time I read, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, I was immediately drawn to the grandmother. She reminded me of the old southern women I have run across in my own small town in Georgia: judgmental, proud, and in denial. Throughout the whole story she never once admitted she was wrong, which consequently killed her and the rest of the family.

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581 Words | 3 Pages

The Misfit claims he was convicted of a crime that was not committed and buried alive in prison for killing his father. Being made to suffer for a crime which was not committed does not seem fair to this character.. The Misfit quotes on page 509,” I never was a bad boy that I remember of...” The Misfit is not actually a bad person he may have been sexually abused in prison or experienced some form of domestic violence as a child. The story describes the character as a man, why then does he refer to himself as a boy?

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670 Words | 3 Pages

The Misfit knows who he is and does not pretend to be otherwise, unlike the old lady. With a show of unpretentiousness, he clearly states, “Nome, I ain’t a good man” (O’Connor 427). In the end, the antagonist enlightens the Grandmother with his brutal honesty, and her “head cleared for an instance” (O’Connor 430). In the final moments of her life, she is able to drop all pretenses and view evil in the form of the Misfit as something she can accept within herself by exclaiming, “Why you’re one of my babies” (O’Connor 430). Ironically, at the moment she reaches out to him, he kills her.

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1371 Words | 6 Pages

In the 1953 short story titled “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, readers are given a glimpse of what the end of the story may look like through use of foreshadowing, symbolism, and other literary techniques. Although the story looks to be an innocent story of a family who travels to Florida for vacation at the start of it, readers soon find out that the story has a darker twist to it. This family trip turns violent and this gruesome ending can easily represent the violence taking place in America during the time this story was written by O’Connor and even today. The short story starts off with a family of six- parents, a grandmother, and three children-

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1111 Words | 5 Pages

Jenny Yedid Sophomore English 2HN Mrs. Marcus 4 April 2016 “A Good Man is Hard to Find” analysis Flannery O’Connor once said, “All my stories are about the action of Grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.” “A Good Man is Hard to Find” illustrates these methods. The grandmother, who is very egotistical in the beginning, is the character who receives a moment of Grace.

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488 Words | 2 Pages

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a short story written by Flannery O’Connor. The story is delivered in third person limited omniscient with the grandmother being the central character. Throughout the story the grandmother sees herself as a trustworthy lady with superior morals, although the reader examines her as a selfish and sneaky manipulator. Because the grandmother views herself one way but the reader understands her true nature, the result is dramatic irony.

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1208 Words | 5 Pages

In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the author, Flannery O'Connor, demonstrates how a family vacation can quickly face a violent end, caused by a criminal known as “The Misfit.” Looking at the short story through a feminist point of view, one can quickly gather that O’Connor uses the traditional gender roles right from the beginning of the story. As reading the title, it automatically suggests the men 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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568 Words | 3 Pages

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor depicts a contemporary society, in which the characters’ behaviors are terribly like those habits and attitudes of the real-world, with citizens who attempt to live their lives not only under the precepts of ethics and morals, but to live according to the principles of human dignity. The main character of the story, the Grandmother, wishes to see this moment of death postponed indefinitely, as any other human being does, however her behavior reveals how alienated she is from the real world. The unnamed grandmother is a fussy, manipulative, ridiculously old-fashion Southern matron. She is living proof of calcified Southern womanhood.

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814 Words | 4 Pages

As you can see her stories are surrounded by her belief. In today’s world societal morals and values have drastically crumbled making the world an unacceptable place. Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” moves from a family comedy into a brutal revelation while on a family vacation. While on the way to find the homestead where grandmother grew up, she puts them down the wrong path right into a murderer’s escape route.

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1016 Words | 5 Pages

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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1393 Words | 6 Pages

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a story where the roles of good and evil blend together. In the short story, a family in the rural South gets caught up with a criminal named the Misfit after their wreck and they end up getting murdered. The clash between the grandmother and the Misfit highlights the religious aspects of the story and also O’Connor’s beliefs. Her stylistic traits of violence, distortion, and religion are used to convey a corrupt world that needs salvation. O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation.

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1743 Words | 7 Pages

The Role of Family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O’Connor is a short story that brings out mystery and cruelty. Manipulation plays a big role in this story by the grandmother. She tends to manipulate her family and tends to get her way by playing with them. Although the author wanted to give many perspectives of the grandmother, we as reader got our own views of her.

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1254 Words | 6 Pages

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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