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Distortion In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is revolved around many distortions that the author O’Connor creates to build meaning within the story. The novel presents characters that are characterized through many different symbols that result in an uncanny feeling for the reader. O’Connor’s “place” is the distortion in the story that causes conflict, creating the uncanny feeling in the story. O’Connor’s “place” also represents a different variety of symbols, creating the necessary meaning of the psychological realism. O’Connor utilizes distortion to create meaning in the story within her characters who represent the conflicts within the Catholic Church and dramatizes it with a complicated sense of humor. O’Connor’s use of satire and how morbid the characters give the reader to not sympathize with them because of their pettiness, ludicrous, and so irredeemably gauche character. “O’Connor creates hearty guffaws and cries of horror, then …show more content…

“Her characters, who sometimes accept and other times reject salvation, often have a warped self-image, especially of their moral status and of the morality of their actions” (Hobby). This addresses how some of the important lines in the story describe to the reader about the extreme exaggeration and the psychological realism of the church, which O’Connor wanted to express within her story. The extreme use of exaggeration and how the use of the characters bring a sense of an uncanny feeling of good and evil within each character, portrays how deep the meaning is seen in this short story. “the story is filled with dark, grotesque humor created largely by the story 's many ironies” (Hobby). The author of this source highly emphasizes that O’Connor creates this dark humor for her characters to build on her meaning in the story and uses irony to create the distortion within her

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In doing this also exemplifies the characters as more life-like, which is also backed up by O'Connors background experience growing up in the South. With all these aspects contributing towards an appeal to readers’ ethics, O’Connor is able to earn the trust from the audience to consider this piece of writing along with it’s implied

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Iris Nevers Nevers 1 Mrs. Gobbell English 2010 26 October 2014 Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque In my paper, I will research Flannery O'Connor and the grotesque religious themes often found in her stories. In the world of Flannery O'Connor's fiction, characters are seldom who we think they are or even who they themselves think they are.

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Flannery O’Connor is a Southern Gothic writer and the author of the tale “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” This story is based off of a real man named The Misfit, a serial killer that kills a family quit hysterically. Flannery O’Connor style in the Southern Gothic tale “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is characterized by bizarre characters, a southern setting, violence, and the occasional racial display. O’Connor’s work, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, is a plot driven hysterical piece of art. A family consisting of six people; a grandmother, a mother and father, two children, and a baby, are planning a trip.

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A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor is a short story that expresses the many different literary devices. The ones that appear throughout are symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony. O’Connor shows how there is always more to the words that are spoken than just what the ear allows to be heard. Through these devices, O’Connor reveals to the reader the deeper meaning behind the words and how the words express grace that then leads to salvation. O’Connor really tests the audience’s focus with her symbolism techniques because she makes the reader have to find the truth and go beyond the text.

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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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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

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She put her imperfect characters in often times disturbing conditions. Her writing delved into religion and the morality of her characters when such situations arose. O’Connor brilliantly uses dark twists and foreshadowing to give her stories an additional appeal. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the story opens with the grandmother not wanting to go to Florida on account of the fact that a murderer had escaped and was on the loose(361). This exemplifies O’Connor’s proficient use of foreshadowing.

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In the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Cathedral”, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver use unexpected figures and characters as a way to change the main character’s personality and thoughts. In both stories, the authors create characters that are introduced in order to change the main character’s thoughts. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”,

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Grace is a gift from God that aids humans in their journey towards salvation; however, humans may freely choose to accept or deny this gift. Flannery O’Connor, a Southern gothic Catholic writer, once said that humans deny God’s grace because it changes them, and humans resist change because it is painful. Grace gives one hope in salvation and the strength to pursue it; however, in the absence of grace, one loses hope and the strength to grow. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A God Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit embodies the rejection of God’s grace and exhibits that the acceptance of it warrants personal growth, which can be challenging.

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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

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Moreover, when the Misfit and the two men shoot the whole family in the woods, it illustrates the sinister and cruel world that needs saving. The violent car crash that causes the family to encounter the Misfit in the first place adds to the violent display that O’Connor creates of the world. O’Connor uses the violence in the story to shock the readers into self-awareness (Larson 1). She uses this self-awareness to bring to light the religious theme of redemption and grace for the corrupted. O’Connor’s

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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.

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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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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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No one would have thought that the idyllic Southern life style could be turned into a Southern nightmare. In O 'Connors "A Good Man is Hard to Find" that is precisely what happens. " A Good Man is Hard to Find" is set in Southern America. This story has many tenets comparable to that of Southern Gothic fiction. Southern Gothic writing emphasizes on abnormal character and unusual events to create an unsettling portray of life in Southern America.

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