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Good Men Are Hard To Find Literary Analysis

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Imagine oneself being left in the top floor of a barn alone. The hay scratches one’s leg, but the annoyance of the itching does not compare to the feeling of desertion and worthlessness in one’s heart. For the first time, one allows oneself to open up to another human being. In one’s first moment of vulnerability, the person steals one’s artificial leg, glasses, and a piece of one’s heart, leaving one empty, physically and emotionally. Or imagine oneself on a family vacation that somehow goes wrong in every way possible. One’s car flips and one’s family is stranded with no others around. However, when one think help arrives, it turns out to be one’s worst nightmare. The men kill one’s precious family members individually, and you are the last …show more content…

She was considered a “harmless busybody, utterly self-absorbed, but also amusing”. She was raised in a later time period and had a few character flaws due to her class and time, racism being one of them. Most of GMHTF is just building up to the main part of the story, which is the final moment between the grandmother and The Misfit. Throughout most of the story, the grandmother was very self absorbed, thinking of no one except herself. However, once her family was killed and she was the only one left, she realized her faults in herself and her life as the gun was pointed towards her. She tried to tell The Misfit of Jesus, and offered him salvation through The Lord. She even goes to the point of saying, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (Page 11). She then proceeded to reach out and touch The Misfit, causing him to jump back and send three bullets in her chest. She tried to show him the love that he would have felt if he accepted the love of Christ. The Misfit then says, “She would have been a good women… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (Page 11). This situation forces one to sit back and contemplate about themselves. One would want to be considered good at all moments of one’s life, not when one’s life is nearing the …show more content…

“The Misfit feels the mystery of evil in his bones, and he finds is incomprehensible” (Desmond). He knows that he is, in fact, a bad man. However, he knows that he is not the worst man either. The Misfits wants answers to the evil he feels in himself and the evil he witnesses in the world. He wants to understand the personal suffering he experienced compared to the actions he committed. The Misfit wants salvation, however like Hulga, he does not want it from God. He wants personal salvation. After The Misfit kills the grandmother, the men he was with laugh and comment on how fun it was. However, The Misfit says, “It’s no real pleasure in life” (Page 11). The
Misfit makes one wonder how a man can commit evil acts, recognize that the acts are evil, wants to justify his acts because it makes him feel empty, and yet reject the one thing that can prevent his evil ways and make him feel whole, Jesus Christ. It makes one look at oneself and realize that we all commit evil acts everyday and we all recognize that they are bad. However, most of us typically do not commit the same acts at The Misfit. Yet no one has a right to say one evil act is far more evil then the other. O’Connor’s short story makes you step back and analyze one’s actions and judgment towards other’s

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He believes that there is no pleasure in life, and takes no remorse in killing people. His selfish morals are what causes him to be so empty hearted and almost soulless, obsessing in his own codes of right and wrong that he is being led into the worst things any person can have, hatred and hopelessness. The Misfit is blinded by his own actions and desires, believing that what he is doing is right, which ultimately leads to the death of his mother and her family. The second symbol utilized in this story is the black hat. The Misfit shows up to the car wreck wearing tight jeans and “holding a black hat and a gun.”

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Why did The Misfit do Evil Tasks? In the world we live in there are delightful people that enrich our lives. There are also some dark citizens that make life harder and also cause us to live in a slight fear. Some authors have been able to capture realistic depictions of these frightening misfits.

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There is something which occurred in his childhood that triggered the Misfit to want to commit these violence. The Misfits name plays a significant role in the story. This character feels out of place in the world and different from everyone else. There is an innocent gesture in the story the Misfit claims the reason for his name is because he can’t make what all he has done wrong fit the

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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.

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Flannery O’Connor is an acclaimed author who is admired for her short stories which are often seen as modern day christian parables. In her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” she writes about a family who is going on vacation and has the misfortune to run into a criminal who eventually murders them. This criminal is called The Misfit, and he is a victim of the disease of loneliness. The Misfit is put into a prison for a long time at some point in his past when he was young, this has affected him greatly.

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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

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Unlike the grandmother, who basically thinks that she is ethically superior to everyone else, the Misfit seriously questions the meaning of life and his role in it. He has cautiously measured his procedures in life and observed his understandings to get lessons surrounded by them. The Misfit has a stable vision of life and acts along with what he thinks is right. His thinking and actions are not ethical in the conservative sense, but they are sturdy and reliable and consequently give him a power of assurance that the grandmother lacks. O’Connor called the Misfit a “prophet gone wrong,” and in fact, if he had applied his moral reliability to a less immoral way of life, he could have been measured a true

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The misfit is a criminal whom just escaped prison and is now running from the law. These quotes reveal his troublesome nature and devious ways. While he is a person who has killed before, the misfit acts as if he is embarrassed to be shirtless in front of the women like a gentleman would be. The misfit then claims that he was framed for the crime that put him in jail, but his killing spree seems to show differently. The criminal nature of the misfit is masked by pretending to be a gentleman and claiming he was framed.

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946 Words | 4 Pages

Redemption is the act of being saved from acts of evil and sin. The debate of whether human nature is redeemable or not has been one to plaque religious scholars. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, this question continues in the interactions between the characters; the most notable being the Grandmother of a rather horrible family and the Misfit, a murderer. While on a road trip, these two characters’ paths collide and lead to a rather unfortunate end where the Grandmother and her family are killed. While many readers believe the ending creates and overall negative tone of the story, some believe that there is a hope for redemption; the story’s author O’Connor who is a devoted Catholic included.

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1016 Words | 5 Pages

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.

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1393 Words | 6 Pages

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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1601 Words | 7 Pages

The Misfit is seen as being a part of reality and only believing what he sees with physical evidence. He also stays true to his morals of what he believes is right and wrong, especially when it comes to showing the equality of no mercy among the family members. Both characters reveal their use of Jesus, the spiritual battle that inhibits them and their concepts of reality. All of this gives insight to how there are no good or bad characters at the finale of this story. The battle of morality between the two characters only shows the

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1637 Words | 7 Pages

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.

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1254 Words | 6 Pages

(6:27). O 'Connor presents both the view of the Misfit as a fellow human being in pain, and the feeling of love for him, as a gift from God. The grandmother as a human being, is prone towards evil and selfishness, so she could never have come to feel such love without God 's help, as this man was going to kill her. This moment of grace is incredibly important in the story. The Misfit kills the grandmother, withdrawing from her and what seems foreign to him (human compassion), but the grandmother already had her moment of redemption.

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844 Words | 4 Pages

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?"

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