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How Does O Connor Use The Southern Gothic Genre

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The Southern Gothic Genre can be described as fictional stories written about people with disturbed personalities and macabre situations. Several traits make up this genre, a few of them are, unrequited love, being an outsider, and good vs. evil. This genre does not deal with the supernatural, although it does deal with disturbed people with unusual personalities. In the short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, Flannery O'Connor uses the Southern Gothic genre. This story was written in 1953. O’Connor uses the theme Good vs. Evil to describe when the Grandmother and the Misfit are arguing. The Misfit has just broken out of prison and is going around killing people. When the grandmother tells Bailey to take a detour, they end up flipping the car and the Misfit drives up with some of his friends. The Misfit kills the Grandmother and leaves the family running in the woods. O’Connor also uses the theme of Social Class to show the Southern Gothic Genre. The Grandmother uses the title of “a lady” to try to convince the Misfit not to kill her. …show more content…

“The Possibility of Evil” was written in 1965. In the story, Shirley Jackson uses the theme of being an outsider. The theme is used when she writes about “Miss Strangeworth”. “Miss Strangeworth” believes that it is her duty to protect the town and keep all of the evil out, but she really does not know anything about what is going on in her town, she just wants people to think that she does. Jackson also uses the theme of violence in the short story. When “Miss Strangeworth” sees that the baby next door is acting a little slow she sends the parents a letter about it, but in return she gets a letter saying to look at her rose garden and it is all torn up and in

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Characters serve as the metaphorical foundation upon which a story is written. In fact, the personalities of characters often reveal the outcome of a story’s plot before the author explicitly states it. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the self-indulgent grandmother portrays the outcome of her attempted evangelism through her sanctimonious nature. Through her illegitimate Christian appearance based on deceit and self-elevation, her failed attempt to persuade the Misfit can be attributed to her hypocritical personality.

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Compare And Contrast Good Man Is Hard To Find

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In a "Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O 'Connor, the contrast of good and evil is not as evident as it appears on the surface. The road that the family in the story travels symbolizes good up until the point the grandmother all but forces the family to make a detour onto a dirt road that leads to their demise. She is the unlikely antagonist in the story. A serial killer named, The Misfit, is the protagonist despite his homicidal actions. Both characters in the story help to illustrate how a relationship with God is perceived good and sacrilegious behavior is perceived evil.

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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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O’Connor implements details to convey that the Misfit was positively affected by the Grandmother. Firstly, the Misfit revaluates the meaning of his life. Before

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

1142 Words | 5 Pages

Flannery O’Connor is a renowned Southern author, noted for her gothic works and heavily Catholic themes. She focuses predominantly on racial tensions, morality, and divine grace. The religious and moral themes of her short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, converge on the character of the grandmother. Despite the self-proclamations of fulfilling what it means to be a Southern lady, Grandmother holds a superficial grasp of her religion. Throughout the story, the Grandmother never truly changed, only her ostensible actions did.

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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 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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Most of the characters have broken personalities which are damaged and delusional. People, places, and events in Southern Gothic literature seem to be ordinary at first, but in the end, they reveal to be odd, disturbing and sometimes very gruesome. "A good man is Hard to Find" is a horrific tale about

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When defining the southern gothic genre, it 's the genre that is fixated on the grotesque and about the tension between the realistic and the supernatural. Some of the characteristics include alienation, decayed settings, and more. There are more elements that display this genre, and it 's all shown in the story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Within this story, it covers many of the characteristics that we see in southern gothic stories. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, we are introduced to one of the first main characteristic of a southern gothic story; a decayed setting.

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