Foreshadowing In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Jenny Yedid
Sophomore English 2HN
Mrs. Marcus
4 April 2016
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” analysis

Flannery O’Connor once said, “All my stories are about the action of Grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.” “A Good Man is Hard to Find” illustrates these methods. The grandmother, who is very egotistical in the beginning, is the character who receives a moment of Grace. This story is also very violent, in that a whole family is executed. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” describes an dysfunctional family from Georgia traveling on vacation to Florida. The whole family is murdered by a criminal, called the Misfit. Before the selfish, self-centered, and voluble

The Misfit kills her but she still dies with a smile on her face. In this story, O’Connor uses foreshadowing, symbolism, and metaphor to establish the theme of the story that everyone has the potential to receive a moment of Grace, gain redemption, and die as a “good” person, no matter how impious their actions in life. Instances of foreshadowing occur several times in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” One example appears when the family prepares for the trip, the grandmother purposely wears a navy polka-dot dress so that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” The grandmother plans her outfit with an eye toward disaster. Another example of foreshadowing is when the family drives passed a large cotton field with five or six graves in the middle of it. This hints the approaching of death of the six occupants of the

In the beginning of the story, the family is preparing for the trip or, in other words, preparing for adulthood. Also, the grandmother tells her family about her life when she was young. She says that when she was a maiden lady, a man named Edgar Atkins Teagarden would bring her watermelons. Next, the family travels on the treacherous dirt road southeast to Florida. The dirt road serves as adulthood. “The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments.” The tortuous road has many twists and turns and obstacles, just like life and adulthood does. Lastly, the family gets into an accident, which leads the family to be in the hands of the Misfit. The Misfit ends up killing the whole family, which portrays the last stage in one’s life. This specific plot structure affects the theme because it shows the cycle of life. Every person goes through life and once they reach the stage of adulthood, they will experience difficult obstacles. It’s not always easy to make the right decision when confronting these obstacles because one may not have the clarity to know what to do. They may do wrong actions and make mistakes, but they still have they potential to be saved by God and gain redemption, just like the grandmother