Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
A good man hard to find analysis
Flannery o'connor analysis
A good man is hard to find character analysis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor both share some similarities. The first major similarity recognized is the Christianity within both main characters. The grandmother preaches to the Misfit and prays as a series of unfortunate events are occurring to her family members in the woods. In relation, Mrs. Turpin prays and thanks the Lord for the status and class of her and her husband, Claud. Mrs. Turpin also receives a message from one of the characters, Mary Grace, she told Mrs. Turbin that she was a warthog and she belonged in hell, which lead Mrs. Turbin to believe that God had sent that message to her with a purpose.
(O’Connor 417). In society, The Misfit is considered a criminal and a deviant, while the Grandmother would be perceived as an innocent, old woman. When looking at both of the characters actions one might say that The Misfit is more morally wrong than the Grandmother because he kills her in the end, however, the Grandmother is consistently manipulative and self-serving to the point of indirectly killing her family.
The grotesque psychopathic nature of the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” ironically shows how a good man does not truly exist through the revelation and proclamation of what characteristics a good man possess. In the story The Misfit shows characteristics of a psychopath by escaping prison and killing an innocent family. However, The Misfit isn’t the only character in the short story to show psychopathic tendencies. The grandma also shows some characteristics of a psychopath because she does not care or show remorse for her family who was brutally murdered
In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the grandmother, her son Baily, and his family take a vacation to Florida. However, the grandmother is opposed to vacationing in Florida and unsuccessfully tries to convince Baily, to take the family to east Tennessee. Grandmother actively tries to persuade Baily by showing him an article of a loose fugitive by the name of The Misfit traveling towards Florida. This introduction introduces O’Connor’s readers to the stories title “A Good Man.” R. Neil Scott states, Unlike Hawthorne, O’Connor does not depict evil in this story however; she does label the term “good” and what it means in this sense (50).
A compare and contrast essay is the way of comparing the differences and the ways they are similar with two or more things. This method of writing is well known and used especially on a college and high school level. Writing a Compare and Contrast Essay you have to really know about your characters or places you are trying write or tell about. You can’t just write about anything either it has to relate with each other that is the whole point of the contrast part. For example, a good topic for a compare and contrast essay would be comparing/ contrasting two towns or talking your parents.
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Misfit is a criminal who has recently escaped in the South. Yet he is not the only one who does not seem to fit in with society. Who is the other person that does not fit in? The grandmother is the true misfit in the story. From the get go, the grandmother is the odd one out.
Viewing The Misfit as a tragic figure, we sympathize with his actions and feel remorse for who he has become. The readers see him as a victim and sympathize for his actions, including killing the elderly Grandmother. Although he is an awful person, because he is a male character, it is acceptable for him to have issues, but it is not acceptable for a woman to have any sort of issue. As the Misfits says, “She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor), this suggests that the Grandmother was an awfully annoying woman, but if she had a man there to keep her in line, she would have been a decent
In Flannery O’Connor’s, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a grandmother and her family are going on a vacation to Florida, closer to the misfit that escaped. Before the family even gets in the car, the grandmother exhibits
This notion of redemption is primarily seen with the Misfit and his character development away from the pleasure of a murderer. Had it not been for the collision of the Grandmother and his paths, redemption would have been unlikely, even unachievable, for him. O’Connor intended for this story to have a positive ending, despite the death toll that is present at the end of the story. With her Catholic beliefs, the small act of the Grandmother’s compassion and the Misfit’s questioning of his morals are rather impactful to each of their redemptions. Perhaps O’Connor’s religious views could be insightful to religious scholars on the question of whether human nature is
The Misfit 's mind is one of the most complicated of any villain in O 'Connor’s stories and in all literature. His mental state is most evident in "the scene between the Grandmother and the Misfit at the climax of the story" (Walls 3) This recent escapee 's psyche can be described as "tails short of the athlete’s morality, for he plays by no one 's rules except his own" (Fike). This mental state is typical of most criminals but the Misfit’s perception on religion is not so conventional. Usually, when a person commits a heinous act and if the person is spiritual they will say God told them to do it.
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.
The reality between the Misfit and the Grandmother are very different and from this viewpoint it seems as if the Grandmother is a more dishonest and unfaithful person when it comes to selfishness. The Misfit does not express selfishness, rather he equally treats himself as he would with the people that he murdered. With two distinct differences in reality, both show similar signs of
(6:27). O 'Connor presents both the view of the Misfit as a fellow human being in pain, and the feeling of love for him, as a gift from God. The grandmother as a human being, is prone towards evil and selfishness, so she could never have come to feel such love without God 's help, as this man was going to kill her. This moment of grace is incredibly important in the story. The Misfit kills the grandmother, withdrawing from her and what seems foreign to him (human compassion), but the grandmother already had her moment of redemption.
The misfit gains awareness of human morals when he kills the grandmother and he says, "She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O 'Connor 1020), he then realized that she wasn 't all that good. O 'Connor did a good job of interpreting the grandmother as a way to put away the values of the old Southern America; she also interprets the Misfit as a type of common man who is defiantly not perfect which can a realistic version of the new Southern America. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the irritating grandmother cares more about matters such as her appearance and manners, she dressed her best for the car ride and the reason for her doing this is so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady." (O 'Connor 1010). The grandmother is a very selfish woman, the first thing she said to the Misfit is "You wouldn 't shoot a lady, would you?"