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Temptation In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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The road to salvation is full of many obstacles and temptations. It is a journey that is an everyday battle between what is right and what is wrong. As St. Cyril of Jerusalem states, “The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” St. Cyril describes temptation as a dragon that can ruin a person if that person is not careful. The author, Flannery O’Connor, takes this idea of how temptation can swallow a person whole to heart, inspiring her to write about characters that have lost themselves to temptation. Through the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Tom Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, and Mrs. McIntyre …show more content…

McIntyre allows her pride in her farm to grow into selfishness, resulting in the death of others in “The Displaced Person”. Mrs. McIntyre, a widow, hires the Guizac family as more help for her farm, but other workers, particularly Mrs. Shortley and her family, are skeptical of this new family due to their nationality. However, Mr. Guizac proves himself to be a productive worker, and Mrs. McIntyre buys new machinery “…because…for the first time, she had somebody who could operate it” (217). She takes pride in the developments of her farm due to Mr. Guizac, and decides to increase his wages by dismissing the Shortleys, but the Shortleys leave the farm before Mrs. McIntyre can do so, resulting in Mrs. Shortley’s death. Mr. Shortley returns to the farm with contempt for Mr. Guizac, the man Mr. Shortley believes is responsible for his wife’s death. Mrs. McIntyre decides to give Mr. Guizac his notice due to Mrs. Shortley’s death and the Guizacs’ plot to have their cousin marry one of her black workers. However, Mrs. McIntyre never delivers this notice because Mr. Guizac is killed by a runaway tractor, an incident that Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and another worker could have stopped, but are all “…in collusion forever…” instead (263). Stemming from her pride for her plantation, Mrs. Shortley and Mr. Guizac die at the hands of Mrs. McIntyre, which leaves her bedridden and without the source of her

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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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Christians often view salvation as a heavenly resting place; in reality, however, salvation is a lifelong journey that can bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth. This spiritual bridge can be crossed through faith coupled with good works. “Bridge”, a short story by Daniel O’Malley, features a young boy who struggles to comprehend salvation as well as find his own. This motif of salvation is achieved through the use of biblical allusions which also help support the fact that the bridge is a physical representation for the motif of the path to salvation which the narrator fails to cross. O’Malley starts his story with two biblical allusions, “...but also about the flood and locusts and frogs and other plagues that had happened before and could happen again…(192).

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Wise Blood and The Catholicism By Reem Abbas 43380421 Flannery O’Connor is one of the greatest Southern writers during the twentieth century. She is considered as a faithful and a good Christian writer. In her fiction, she never neglects her Catholic concerns. The large respect for O'Connor’s religion appears in most of her literary works.

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(8) Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking to devour. (9) Resist him, firm in you faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. (10) And after a little while, God the of all grace, who has called eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

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Temptation is an occurrence in all daily routines, accompanied with pride and selfishness, due to our lack of knowledge. In “Good Country People”, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, and “The Displaced person” written by Flannery O’ Connor, temptation, pride, and selfishness are common themes. Each short story shows the weakness people have and how easily they are able to give into the sins laid before them. Many famous people have been quoted or have written about how easily temptation, pride, and being selfish can come about, including St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Temptation, pride, and selfishness are unavoidable evils, and they are brought about by our human weakness, each of these short stories, exposed each characters flaws.

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The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is revolved around many distortions that the author O’Connor creates to build meaning within the story. The novel presents characters that are characterized through many different symbols that result in an uncanny feeling for the reader. O’Connor’s “place” is the distortion in the story that causes conflict, creating the uncanny feeling in the story. O’Connor’s “place” also represents a different variety of symbols, creating the necessary meaning of the psychological realism. O’Connor utilizes distortion to create meaning in the story within her characters who represent the conflicts within the Catholic Church and dramatizes it with a complicated sense of humor.

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Through the journey home, the journey from pain, and quest for earthly material, these paths can either destroy or refine the the believer. As most Christians believe, the life of a Christian ultimately ends with Christ’s open arms. However, Christ did not guarantee an easy pilgrimage. In fact, he often reminded his disciples of the fact of pain and temptations.

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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.

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In the stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Cathedral”, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver use unexpected figures and characters as a way to change the main character’s personality and thoughts. In both stories, the authors create characters that are introduced in order to change the main character’s thoughts. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”,

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Redemption is the act of being saved from acts of evil and sin. The debate of whether human nature is redeemable or not has been one to plaque religious scholars. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, this question continues in the interactions between the characters; the most notable being the Grandmother of a rather horrible family and the Misfit, a murderer. While on a road trip, these two characters’ paths collide and lead to a rather unfortunate end where the Grandmother and her family are killed. While many readers believe the ending creates and overall negative tone of the story, some believe that there is a hope for redemption; the story’s author O’Connor who is a devoted Catholic included.

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In a house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, there is solly, a slave who went back to the Underground Railroad after escaping to save the rest of the slaves and help them escape as well. In his way he has help approximately sixty two slaves escape. Citizen Barlow is a character who committed a murder and the murder was accused on an innocent man rather than him. Mostly the whole play consists of mill workers being dissatisfied with each other. The whole discomfort amongst each other leads to the burning of the mill by solly and Barlow whom have fled from Caesar to find out the culprits of the subsequent fires and unrest.

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Sin can get in the way of this journey, like the she-wolf of self-restraint, "the beast pursued, forcing herself against me bit by bit till I slid back into the sunless wood," (Dante, 33 58-60). When faced with the temptation to sin, one has to keep going and, like Dante, make it to

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In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor creates a story where the roles of good and evil blend together. In the short story, a family in the rural South gets caught up with a criminal named the Misfit after their wreck and they end up getting murdered. The clash between the grandmother and the Misfit highlights the religious aspects of the story and also O’Connor’s beliefs. Her stylistic traits of violence, distortion, and religion are used to convey a corrupt world that needs salvation. O’Connor’s trait of violence is used throughout to reveal the corrupt and criminal world that emanates the need for salvation.

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Anthony saw in a vision the whole world entangled in a net of sin. “O Lord,” he cried out, “who will escape these snares?” And a voice from Heaven answered: “ONLY THOSE WHO ARE HUMBLE OF HEART.” “If you accept adversities willingly from the hand of God, “says Thomas a Kempis, “you show Him great honor, rejoice the angels, edify your neighbor, shame the devil, and heap up treasures for yourself in Heaven. The trials of this life are brief, but your reward in Heaven will be exceedingly great and peace without end.”

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In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she uses writing skills such as symbolism and imagery to get across her different themes to the reader’s with plenty of room for self-interpretation. Though O’Connor’s work could be defined as cynical, she does an excellent job of writing in the third person with her uncomplicated structure of sentences leaving plenty of room for her character 's thoughts, feelings, and actions to get across the realism of our world. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a battle between a grandmother with a rather artificial sense of goodness, and a criminal who symbolizes evil. The grandmother treats goodness as having good manners, and coming from a family of higher class, but at the end of the story comes to

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