Conflict In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the readers are drawn to a family with the grandmother as the matriarch headed to Florida. The grandmother can be seen as domineering and self-righteous in her behavior towards her grandchildren. Thus, the themes of conflict in the family are very prominent themes in the story with O’Connor highlighting the grandmother’s character to drive home this message. The family begins to get ready to go on their vacation to Florida for about three days. The grandmother begins to do everything in her power to convince her son, Bailey, that he needs to take the kids to East Tennessee, because they’ve never been before and of course because that is where she has her connections. She began to read

Three men get out of the car and they were all carrying guns. The sun has begun to go down, but the grandmother recognizes one of them from the description as the misfit, and she screams. The man quickly tells her that isn’t a good thing. The mother of the children is asked to have her kids sit down because they are making him nervous standing around. Bailey begins to curse and upsets his family and mother because they are all scared. The grandmother then begins to question the misfits and ask them if they would ever shoot a lady; the man replies and says that he wouldn’t like to, but he would. Meanwhile, Bailey and John Wesley, were escorted into the woods by one of the other men and shortly after a shotgun was fired. The grandmother was busy reminding the men that they are all good people and that they just need to pray to Jesus. The misfit replies that he is “fine on his own,” he has thought about Jesus more than the grandmother has but he believes “there is no right or wrong.” The grandmother goes on and on with the Misfits about how they are all good people even after she has heard all of her family get shot. This provides evidence the most out of the story that this family was dysfunctional as they