Compare And Contrast Cathedral And A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Authors of short fiction always strive to communicate a message in their stories for the reader to discover. Their message makes their story memorable and it gives the reader something to take away. Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” have very comparable messages concealed behind their stories. Although these two authors share their messages with vastly different stories, the protagonists in their stories convey similar messages for the reader to uncover. The authors of both “Cathedral” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” use the protagonist to communicate that maintaining a stubborn mindset is human nature and it takes a significant experience to change one’s way of thinking. The short story

She only looks for problems in the world around her and is quick to criticize people other than herself. Her interaction with The Misfit clearly shows how selfish she truly is. When The Misfit shows up after their car veers off the road, the grandmother and her family’s life is put in danger. She never once seems to care about the fate of her grandchildren when their lives are threatened by The Misfit (Mitchell). Instead, the first thing that the grandmother does is think about herself and question The Misfit’s will to murder a lady (referring to herself). 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

Moments before The Misfit murders her, she screams out “‘You’re one of my own children!’” (O’Connor 627). This signifies that the grandmother has finally realized that she is flawed just as The Misfit is. After The Misfit shoots and kills the grandmother, he articulates that the grandmother would have been a better person only if there was “somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor 627). This speaks to the fact of how difficult it is to change somebody’s way of thinking. Moreover, it also shows that it was within her reach for her to change (Nester). It is extremely hard to change the way the human mind thinks, but it is possible. The grandmother had to be threatened with her life to finally come to the realization that she is