Self Awareness In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor’s goal is to teach her readers an important lesson. By presenting an exaggerated and flawed character, and through a peek into her life, she displays the consequences of many faults, but most importantly, the danger of a lack of self-awareness. By the end of the story, the main character, Grandmother, has had an epiphany, brought on by a traumatizing event. By giving them an outside view of the folly of her character, Flannery O’Connor hopes to warn her readers of following the same path that will inevitably lead to destruction in some way or another. Flannery O’Connor ‘s short work of fiction, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about Grandmother, a woman who thinks very highly of herself, and has absolutely no self-awareness as to what kind of person she really is. No matter how much she manipulates and judges, she still

Even her young grandchildren acknowledge that their Grandmother is unabashedly nosy when they comment: “She wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks… afraid she’d miss something” (O’Connor Good Man 284). The children don’t seem to be extremely fond of her; most likely because of the condescending way she often speaks to them. When they are driving through Georgia, John Wesley makes a disparaging comment about their home state, and the Grandmother responds haughtily saying, “If I were a little boy, I wouldn’t talk about my native state that way” (O’Connor Good Man 285). Despite all this, she still views herself as a good and fine woman. When talking to the man at the restaurant where the family stops for lunch, she remarks, “People are certainly not nice like they used to be” (O’Connor Good Man 287). Grandmother is obviously grouping herself in as a nice person, despite how she has treated her family in the little bit of time that the readers have observed her. This shows her ridiculous lack of