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Manipulation In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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The Grandmother is a well-dressed and a proper southern lady. She is also the center of action in the short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". The grandmother seems very suspicious at first, and thinks her son Bailey will be forever small and has to abide by her rules. In her eyes she is never been wrong but knows it all. When we become up-close and personal with the grandmother we see that she's this bad person, which she appears to be old-fashioned, manipulative, and self-serving as a whole.

The grandmother is an elderly southern old-fashioned woman stuck in her old ways. Flannery O'Connor states, "Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" She said and pointed to a negro child standing in the door of the shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, …show more content…

To give one example of manipulation, Flannery O'Connor, Georgia State author of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", writes that "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?"(421). The grandmother is trying to make the misfit vulnerable, even though he has already killed everyone but her. She's begging the misfit for her life. Every one of those people would still be alive if it was not for the grandmother. She did not have much hope left anyways for her life because she annoyed the misfit with her ugly and selfish ways. In another quote the grandmother implies that the misfit is a good man by stating, "Yes it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen, " she said, "You shouldn't call yourself the misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell" (421). The grandmother doesn't know the misfit from Adam, yet she already gave him a persona that he has to match. Besides the grandmother has already called Red Sammy a good man, and by now it is already apparent that its feigned. She is only trying to convince the misfit that he is a good man because she wants to be freed, and her life is in shambles. Also, the grandmother has already gone back on her word multiple of times, calling the misfit a big, bad, and scary man. Now all of the sudden he is a good man. Therefore, the grandmother still has not changed a

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“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor begins with the introduction of the grandmother. It can quickly be noted that this woman holds herself in high regard. Grandmother views herself as a prim and proper lady. However, she does not possess the qualities of a lady. She is dishonest, selfish, and hypocritical.

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Red Sammy was not a good man here because he was gullible, but the Grandma thought otherwise. Also, the idea of the “Good Man” gets wrongly used again when the Grandma runs into the Misfit. The Misfit is about to kill the Grandma when she calls him “good” and says that a “Good Man” would not shoot a lady. She then gets shot in the chest three times by a man she called “good” because she thought he aligned with her moral code.

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She only looks for problems in the world around her and is quick to criticize people other than herself. Her interaction with The Misfit clearly shows how selfish she truly is. When The Misfit shows up after their car veers off the road, the grandmother and her family’s life is put in danger. She never once seems to care about the fate of her grandchildren when their lives are threatened by The Misfit (Mitchell). Instead, the first thing that the grandmother does is think about herself and question The Misfit’s will to murder a lady (referring to herself).

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Throughout the piece, the unnamed grandmother is shown to be an annoying and deceitful person. The Grandmother 's "selfish focus" has made the people around her miserable particularly her son (Brown 2). Bailey 's relationship with his mom is rocky but it is never shown just how long it had been deteriorating. In later paragraphs, the grandmother is revealed to be

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The reality between the Misfit and the Grandmother are very different and from this viewpoint it seems as if the Grandmother is a more dishonest and unfaithful person when it comes to selfishness. The Misfit does not express selfishness, rather he equally treats himself as he would with the people that he murdered. With two distinct differences in reality, both show similar signs of

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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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