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Grandmother In Flannery O Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” tells of a family who takes a vacation down to Florida and encounters a wanted serial killer nicknamed The Misfit. While the story appears to revolve around The Misfit himself, it actually is about the true misfit of the story, the grandmother. The grandmother is the true misfit due to her inability to cooperate with her family, her inability to let go of racist tendencies, and her inability to live in the present.
Right from the get-go, the grandmother is straining the relationship she has with her family by being uncooperative. The grandmother spends her time talking at, not to, family members who “didn’t seem to hear her” (O’Connor). The few that do are disrespectful and fed up with her, and both of her grandchildren in the story are ready and eager to talk back to her. …show more content…

Bailey’s indifference towards his mother is indicative of what their relationship has been over the years from his childhood and into his adulthood. Bailey seems sick of the grandmother living with and being around him. The grandmother is very irritating to her family, and that shows throughout the story by their unwillingness to speak with her.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is set in the mid 20th century, and presumably in the middle of the civil rights movement. The grandmother is an outcast from her own family by still expressing her outdated beliefs about African-Americans. The grandmother refers to African-

Americans as “pickaninnies” and “niggers” throughout the story, and tells a few racist stories.
None of her racist remarks are even acknowledged by her own family, which speaks wonders to her outdated opinions. The grandmother tells of a love interest who brought her a

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William Martin Professor English 15 April 2017 A Good Man Is Hard To Find: What Is “Good”? In this work by Mary Flannery O’Connor, the protagonist, referred to as “the grandmother,” tries to persuade her son to take the family to East Tennessee. Her son, Bailey, wants to visit Florida instead and so she tries to change his mind.

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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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The Grandmother “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story of Flannery O’Connor, and it is about a family which is going to Florida for a vacation, but instead ends up killed by prison runners whose names are the Misfit, Bobby Lee, and Hiram. The story mainly focused on the grandmother whose selfish behavior leads to a sudden tragic end for her family and herself at the end of the story. Even though Flannery O’Connor did not give the grandmother a name, she gave her a very interesting character, which has its own values. Throughout the story the grandmother is appears to value her status of a lady, her own desires and life, and religion. One of the values that is very important for the grandmother is being a lady.

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Prunty states, “The people who populate O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" are flat yet exaggerated individuals facing their own meanness and mortality.” The immediate focus of the story turns to the grandmother who

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The short story “A Good Man Is Hard To find” by Flannery O’Conner, was published in 1955. It was written in third person limited point of view. The story takes place in the 1940s after world two, family takes a road trip traveling to Florida, but their journey takes an unsuspecting turn. O’Conner uses foreshadowing, verbal and situational irony and symbolism that illustrates the theme of the effect of the selfishness of the grandmother upon the family. The first character introduced in the story is the protagonist, the unnamed grandmother.

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In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the author, Flannery O'Connor, demonstrates how a family vacation can quickly face a violent end, caused by a criminal known as “The Misfit.” Looking at the short story through a feminist point of view, one can quickly gather that O’Connor uses the traditional gender roles right from the beginning of the story. As reading the title, it automatically suggests the men in this short story are untrustworthy, not prevalent, and dangerous. With that being said, the female characters in this story are viewed in the eyes of how a woman should act.

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One of O’Conner acclaimed work is “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A family plans a vacation to Florida, but the Grandmother suggests to go to Tennessee, the place she grew up, instead because a serial killer, The Misfit, is in the loose headed to Florida. The family dismisses the Grandmother attempt and embark on a trip to Florida. The Grandmother, using her cunning ability, convinces the family to take a detour to visit an old house "with treasure". The family listens and heads toward the old house.

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The misfit might be talking about his evil ways, saying that his done with his evil ways as it brings no joy. The story of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about a grandmother who cares nothing but about herself. She judges people based off appearance, and not their character. She is selfish as she doesn’t care about Baileys family when they are in the encounter with the misfit, but instead does everything she can to potentially save herself.

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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 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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