Summary Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Gannery O Connor

In Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, one of the characters known as Nanny was constantly manipulating and lying to the people around her. In the story, Nanny was on the way to a family road trip with her son, his wife, and their son and daughter. She was the constant critique in their ear, except, when it came to upholding her own expectations, she seemed to do the exact opposite of what she says. Nanny preached that appearance means personality and ironically her own actions and manipulation led to her and her family’s death. Nanny was the depiction of “things are not what they seem” in her character. This story is another example of human behavior and how the human mind can work. The irony of it all is the theme of stating

Nanny was complaining of having to go to Florida and trying to manipulate her son into going somewhere else that would only please her “The Grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing every chance to change Bailey’s mind.” (O’Connor 34). Although Nanny did take pride in her religion and met her expectations on the outside, she happened to be a very abysmal person on the inside. Her faking the fear of running into the Misfit at the beginning of the story foreshadows their run-in with him and eventually leads to her own family’s death. Throughout the story, the same selfishness that was shown at the beginning of the story is what ended the story as well. O’Connor used the interaction between The Misfit and Nanny to push the theme of this broken image of human expectations. When Nanny was face to face with The Misfit, she tried to encourage him to pray, and make him feel guilty for his actions to convince him not to hurt them by saying things like “I just know you’re a good man,” (O’Connor 42) and “You’re not a bad man!” (O’Connor