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Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

970 Words4 Pages

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1965) is one of the most influential Southern Gothic writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Verde). She draws readers time after time through her grotesque and haunting short stories. Two of her most acclaimed stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "The Lame Shall Enter First" focus on the same theme; good versus evil. As well as using theme to convey her message, she utilizes irony to shock and mystify the readers. The internal struggle between a person's will power and humanity is highlighted often through her many complicated characters. The first story analyzed is "A Good Man is Hard to Find." This story follows a family in the 1950's taking a summer vacation through the south to visit the grandmother's …show more content…

Without becoming aware of the irony in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the story's purpose would not be available to the reader. The first and most important example of irony is when the grandmother states, "I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did" ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find" O'Connor). She is the one who introduces "the Misfit," and states she would never bring his wrath upon her family yet ends up "facing precisely the that criminal she so feared" (Curley). She leads them down the wrong road in more ways than one. Another impacting ironic quote is when Sammy, her grandson, says "A good man is hard to find. Everything is getting terrible. I remember that day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more" ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find" O'Connor). This ends up being the title of the short story, as well as one of the more powerful and resonating quotes to the reader. Sammy is relating a good man to someone who is trustable, yet "The Misfit" shows no signs of distrust. He honors his own word and does not mislead the family. It may not be a conventional form of trust, but what he says and does is still trustworthy. The third quote seeping with irony comes from the grandmother. Sammy let two rough looking men charge their gas without pay, and he reflects back on it pondering why he let them, as grandmother exclaims, "Because you're a good man" (("A Good Man Is Hard to Find" O'Connor)! The grandmother is quick to say he is a "good man," after barely knowing Sammy and seeing only one redeeming action from him. He even shows remorse and confusion after his good deed, yet she ignores this and reassures him he is worthy of praise. The grandmother herself is not in a position to judge what is good or not, being that she displays such inferior characteristics. She values actions by their outward appearance, not their

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A Good Man is Hard to Find: Response “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. ”-Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor’s (A Good Man is Hard to Find) is a great American Southern Gothic published in The Avon Book of Modern Writing, 1953. This type of Gothic writing was not popular at the time, however O’Connor thrived as a writer during this time, with her grotesques satire on poor and middle-class southern whites.

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All the irony gives the piece a vast dynamic in characters and themes. The first irony found in this story is the whole idea of the “Good Man”. The Grandma throughout many different scenarios in the story skewed the definition of a “Good Man” by using it until it became meaningless. She used it to describe Red Sammy after he let two people screw him over by letting them charge their gasoline.

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In many works of literature, authors use different styles and techniques to personalize their stories. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Conner uses a variety of stylistic techniques that help the story be creative. O’Conner uses foreshadowing, which happens when the author uses hints throughout the story that tell the ending before it approaches, to make the story stronger.  The story is about a family vacation that ends in a deadly bloodshed. The title itself reflects that something bad will happen in the story and catches the reader’s eye.   

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In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" contains situational irony. This story, as in most of O'Connor's stories, the irony being a tool that is used throughout all her writings to illustrate the central conflict. Thus O'Connor's tool had not been in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" she uses the irony to paint the picture of the transitioning interaction between the main characters, The Misfit and the grandmother. It is my contention that in the story " A Good Man Is Hard to Find," took the role of highlighting how the fear of death seems to change a person's character for the better. The irony functions as a conduit for the reader to reflect on their personal character by relating to the changes in the grandmother

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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 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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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 bizarre twists of fate of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’ Conner leaves the reader perplexed and reveled to a preconceived ending of good prevailing against evil this gives the story its unique and arousing end which most stories do. O’ Conner uses literary proficiency such as foreshadowing, symbolism, eccentric characters, In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” The Grandmother character is brought to light as self-centered and manipulative. She tries to do everything in her favor and sway situations to fit her own interest regardless of other characters. She tries to manipulate Bailey not to go to Florida but Tennessee, seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind, “seize” isn’t just a casual attempt.

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Flannery O’Connor is widely known for her southern gothic style short stories which entail characters who question their morals. Living in Georgia her entire life, O’Connor was deep in the bible belt and invested herself in Roman Catholicism. Many readers can assume while reading her short stories that she was extremely religious due to the fact religion plays a role and is a theme in each short story. O’Connor was an important addition to American Literature in the early twentieth century being that she composed two novels, thirty-two short stories, and a handful of commentaries and reviews. She was also the first writer born in the nineties to have her works collected and published in the Library of America.

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Violence is something of a common occurrence nowadays -- bombs in the Middle East to shootings in schools. Those are reckless acts driven by impulse but the opposite it true for literature. In some works it appears to be one of those random or wild act but there is a hidden meaning to all the violence; there is a story behind those hostile words. In Flannery O'Conner’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” she finds a way to present a quadruple homicide into a mindless act, with heartless diction and torpid tone to illustrate the theme of conflicting definitions of what makes a good man.

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A good man is hard to find is a story that one is struck by the violence that occurs at the end of the tale unexpectedly. The incident that took place between the misfit and the grandmother, as well as the people that were involved in the accident, can be boastful. The grandmother and the misfit have a conversation that is friendly, and at the same time, it is not that much friendly. The grandmother says that the Misfit or the man in glasses looks like he is a good man and that he knows he comes from good people. The man agrees that he is right and he further says that, “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold.”

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Flannery O’Connor is widely regarded as one of the most iconic Southern Gothic grotesque writers. Her works such as Wise Blood and “A Temple Of The Holy Ghost” manifest the grotesque writing style quite distinctly through their themes and characterization. Her characters and themes exemplify grotesque in their disfigured and unsettling nature. Perhaps O’Connor’s most notable work of short fiction, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” exemplifies the physical and moral aspects of grotesque. Physically, the grotesque manifests itself through characters.

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1601 Words | 7 Pages

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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2014 Words | 9 Pages

However at the end it’s clear that the reader’s reaction can change when she has the conversation with the Misfit, she repeatedly says “I know you’re a good man... You wouldn’t shoot a lady”(14-15), because the reader know thinks that she really is selfish but she’s also ignorant and petty. The only reason that the grandmother is saying positive things about the misfit is because her life is at risk and the second part of the quote shows that she cares about herself and doesn 't ask if he would kill all the family. It shows all her pettiness making the reader think “No wonder why June Star wants her dead”. This is the grandmother’s characteristics of being selfish, ignorant, petty and etc but underneath all the evil that the grandmother has there can be some good things in her just like the

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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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