Hard To Find Foreshadowing

In the story A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor uses the literary elements of characterization and foreshadowing to ask the reader what they would do in an impossible situation when given the choice between right and wrong and having the opportunity to change. The author wants the reader to see that during hard times people can choose to stick with their religion and faith to attempt to overcome the challenge or they could abandon it and live with the burden of the situation.

O’Connor uses Grandmother’s sudden change of character to demonstrate to the readers that people have the ability to change for the better at any point in their lives. At the beginning of the story the Grandmother leaves the children’s mother unnamed because

“The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print… In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor 2). This quote is important to the story because it shows the reader that the grandmother is judgmental and feels superior to others. After all, she thinks her mentality is the right one. Furthermore, O’Connor uses underdeveloped characters like the children’s mother to help make the grandmother’s traits stand out and show that almost everyone possesses these thoughts at some point in their lives in real life, and they should change to have better qualities to avoid bad situations. In contrast, after recognizing the Misfit and putting her and her family into an inescapable situation, the Grandmother finally drops all of her negative traits and turns to God for help. “The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder

"Do you ever pray?" she asked” (O’Connor 9). Evidently, this is the beginning of her changing from a bad person to a good lady that believes in God for the first time and she tries to convince others to become good and pray as well. Consequently, when she starts to become religious, she has more power than him at the moment because she has something to believe in and fight for when everything is going downhill. From this scene, O’Conner tells the reader when they choose their religion, it can prevent dire situations from getting worse and turn unpleasant people into righteous ones, no matter how bad they were to begin with- because God will change people’s characters for the better. In addition, the Grandmother forgave the Misfit after everyone else in her family had died because forgiveness was all she had left, but he didn’t know how to handle it and shot her 3 times. This description illustrates her peace of mind after her death “.…the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” (O’Connor 12) After she dies, she becomes a symbol of God with her legs crossed- like a