“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor begins with the introduction of the grandmother. It can quickly be noted that this woman holds herself in high regard. Grandmother views herself as a prim and proper lady. However, she does not possess the qualities of a lady. She is dishonest, selfish, and hypocritical.
Looking into the story “A Good Man is Hard To Find”, you can determine that this story has a rather dark and thrilling story plot. Even more so when you start to dig deeper into learning more information about a character and the way they function and present themselves in a story. All the characters in this story have great information to offer, but the most prominent character is the grandmother who constantly is causing trouble, and uncertainty. The grandmother, of all characters, has the most promising personality to look deeper into. By looking deeper into the meaning of a character, we can infer good information about the story, and how a characters personality can affect the plot.
Was the Misfit really such a bad guy? In the short story a Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor he is given a bad reputation. He is a felon convicted of murder and escaping prison. However, as he is introduced towards the end of the story he is not portrayed as a macho mean killing machine. He is described as some old looking guy with spectacles, no shirt and tight pants.
has looked into his decisions and he is trying to find the good from his experiences. He feels he deserves more than what he got, so he went on and changed his name, he also believed that he did not get the right punishment for his crime. The misfit has self awareness that the grandmother doesn't know of cause he questioned himself and his actions, he knows he is not a good person but he also believes he is better than many people. He even admitted he was a gospel singer before he did something and was sent to the penitentiary and was buried alive. He had some made up rudimentary philosophies, such as ““the crime don’t matter” and “no pleasure but meanness”.
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?
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.
He is on the verge of tears when the grandmother says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” , (152). When the grandmother had said this to the Misfit, he cannot bear the acceptance which leads him shooting her. The acceptance from the grandmother was mostly caused by the circumstances that her and her family had found themselves in which creates the climax of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”.
This story is about a grandmother who does all the wrong things and ends up getting herself and her family killed. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, we go through this adventure with a family that never truly makes their destination. The lies begin to build and the loose term of a good man gets thrown around one too many times. Does dressing like a lady and acting proper like a lady truly save your life? The grandmother’s moral code and values are skewed and largely self-concerning.
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
A convict and a grandmother are more alike than the common one may think. In Flannery O’Conner’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, demonstrates a similarity between the Misfit and the grandmother showing that good and evil are not the same in all individuals. O’Conner uses these certain characters to show the difference between good and bad, but in the end both the grandmother and the Misfit show a change in character. Flannery O’Conner’s catholic background has influenced all her stories. O’Conner’s family was one of the first to live in her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia she also attended parochial school.
It can be made clear that the Misfit and his two Hench men stole clothes from their victims after killing them. When first seen the Misfit was without a shirt, but then the grandmother recalls saying “Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee”. The evil portion of this is that they not only kill the family, but they take their clothes and leave them in the dark forest without a trace. The Misfit
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.
The balance of what is good and what is bad is a rather controversial topic in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find". Most notably, the characteristics of both the Grandmother and the Misfit. The Misfit portrays an immoral personality and seems to be the evil in the story while the grandmother is the innocent lady seeking to be the good in this story. However, the religious virtues effect both personas and in itself draws the line around them mutually as sinners. Both characters have a particular relationship with Jesus, a physical crisis crossed with a spiritual crisis and different conceptions of reality; thus, revealing how the portrayal of these characters are not what may seem.
The Misfit is a selfish, psychotic murderer, yet he is a good man just like Red Sammy. The grandmother’s skewed interpretation of a good man is attributed to her poor individual morals. Similar to A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Murders in the Rue Morgue contains the social morality associated with murder. Unlike the first story where character’s morality affected their decision making abilities, Murders at the Rue Morgue is centered on social morality. Poe focuses on two main characters throughout the story, C. Auguste Dupin and an unknown murderer.
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?"
