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Theme Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

1433 Words6 Pages

In Flannery O’Connor’s, short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” opens with a family scene in the kitchen. O’Connor sets the stage as an unnamed grandmother, her son Bailey and his family embarks on a vacation nightmare. The scene starts with the family going on vacation to Florida, but the grandmother’s eyes are in Tennessee. The grandmother views herself as a refined, polite, and well-spoken woman (a lady). This paper will show how violence affects the grandmother, her view of a lady and her rebirth at death. Throughout this story violence is the theme; O’Connor takes this unnamed grandmother and puts her through the inconceivable horror. The chain of events starts with the unnamed grandmother manipulating her son Bailey to change his …show more content…

A grandmother that prides herself on being a lady is acting like anything but a lady. She is not honest with her family; she uses her selfishness and manipulation to get her way. Nevertheless, all she can say is you would not kill a lady? The Misfit response is “I would hate to have to” (O’Connor 502). Since she deems herself a lady, again she tries to influence The Misfit stating “I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have a common blood. I know you must come from nice people” (O’Connor 502)! At this point, the grandmother’s believes that her words will influence The Misfit, and he will spare her live. By now the other boy wearing a red shirt came up. The Misfit called him Bobby Lee, and said keep your eyes on the …show more content…

She calls for her son and beacons, The Misfit to pray. The grandmother thinks she can navigate The Misfit out of the dark into the light. She and The Misfit are exchanging words, The Misfit thinking and talking to the grandmother looks at a cloudless sky. Just then, Bobby Lee drags Bailey’s shirt and Hiram the other two criminals came back from the woods. The wife and her daughter and the baby are next. The Misfit asks Bobby Lee and Hiram to take them to the woods. The grandmother alone with The Misfit is at a loss for words. She notices not a cloud in the sky; she tries to speak, but all that comes out is Jesus. The grandmother hears a loud, shrill sound, and then a gunshot follows. The grandmother says “Jesus!’ “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady” (O’Connor 505). Here the grandmother is praying to Jesus so hard it sounds like she is cursing Jesus. The Misfit says “If he did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can” (O’Connor 505). Leave it to O’Connor to mix violence with religion. The symbolism of the sky and higher power says through pain comes new a

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A Good Man Is Hard To Find The Grandmother Character Analysis

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When comparing and contrasting the two short stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Revelation” written by Flannery O’Connor, many similarities are noticed between the main characters as well as many differences. The author of the short stories based them on rejection and redemption in the modern world and it is shown in both stories. The Grandmother and Mrs. Turpin are similar and opposite when comparing being selfish and hypocritical, as well the amount of grace in each character’s life’s. Both the grandmother from “A Good Man is Had to Find” and Mrs. Turpin from “Revelation” are selfish characters but show their selfishness in different ways.

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A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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The grandmother is trying to save herself by constantly talking and trying to convince the Misfit not to shoot her, saying, "You've got good blood! I Know you wouldn't shoot a lady! Pray!" (408). Her constant rambling and attempt to make the Misfit feel guilty eventually leads to the death of her family and herself.

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She admits to her uncle, Dr. Jack Finch, that she “can’t fight them,” and that she feels that she has “no fight left” (Lee 211). Her Uncle responds, showing her that her one-directional views and rebellious attempts have hindered her ability to see the truth that lies before her. “You confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings—I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ‘em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers” (Lee 216).

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The Grandmother is the only member of the family still alive at this point. The misfit holds the grandmother at gunpoint. The grandmother uses faith as a way to escape death and pleads for the character to spare her life. “Pray!” The grandmother pleads pathetically.

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The grandmother and the Misfit’s climactic final encounter reveals a flaw the Misfit’s complex character by the usage of religious symbols. The Misfit states that his actions in the free world are justified because God does not exist. The Misfit is references the biblical event of Jesus raising the dead. The Misfit says “I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would have known” (14) The Misfit believes that because he never saw this event, he has no proof that Jesus is real.

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Analysis Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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and they are all planning a trip to Florida. Although it has been decided that they are going to Florida, the grandmother is frustrated and tries to convince her son and his family that they should go to Tennessee instead since more family lives there and there are sights to see there. She also argues that going to Florida would only put the family in danger as there was a serial killer on the loose who goes by the name of “Misfit”. This, in itself, already raises a red flag for readers since they just so happen to be travelling to a place where a serial killer is running loose. Despite the grandmother’s protests against their trip to Florida, they all get in the car and begin their journey.

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Reality In O Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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(O’Connor) The grandmas impression of solace is twisted by recollections and beliefs ruminating in her subliminal mind as she always searches for and sticks to signifiers that mirror the world she wants, one in which goodness as she would like to think still exist and can be characterized along certain lines that enable her to fit into it. This is the part of her struggle, the battle between her cognizant and intuitive personalities. As the story advances, nonetheless, the reader starts to comprehend that it's not goodness that has been consumed, but rather the thoughts against which the grandma has constantly characterized as goodness, leaving the grandma attempting to accommodate a perspective that does not reflect reality, which is a very serious situation, and which is eventually the wellspring of her torment. Along these lines, the agony from which the grandma looks for alleviation does not originate from the world, but rather from her view of it.

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Ambiguity In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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The grandma has diverged from the cat. Bailey hurled the cat out the window, and the Misfit's partners throw the grandmother into the forested regions. Also, the family is having an examination about the Misfit at Red Sammy's, which is surprising in light of the way that it is not long a while later that they indeed meet the escaped convict (951). In like manner, the Misfit's idea on the grandmother is surprising when he communicates that "she would have been a not too bad woman had she had some individual there to shoot her every snapshot of her life" (955). Most of O'Connor's devices enhance the general plot.

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The Theme Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O Connor

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If Bailey’s mother had listened to him, the wreck probably would not have happened, and they would not have encountered the Misfit. When the Grandmotherfaces the Misfit, she loses the feeling of being a lady. The author exclaims, “ The Grandmotherreached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground” (O’Connor 10).

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It is heavily demonstrated that women are reliant on men when O'Connor describes how the Grandmother lives, “Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy” (O’Connor). This suggests that because the Grandmother seems to

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In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor depicts a contemporary society, in which the characters’ behaviors are terribly like those habits and attitudes of the real-world, with citizens who attempt to live their lives not only under the precepts of ethics and morals, but to live according to the principles of human dignity. The main character of the story, the Grandmother, wishes to see this moment of death postponed indefinitely, as any other human being does, however her behavior reveals how alienated she is from the real world. The unnamed grandmother is a fussy, manipulative, ridiculously old-fashion Southern matron. She is living proof of calcified Southern womanhood.

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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Selfishness Essay

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In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, the author portrays the grandmother as self-centered, dishonest and prideful woman. The grandmother is an old, southern, Caucasian woman who describes herself as a good woman. Throughout the story, O’Connor shows how the grandmother’s pride, and selfishness leads her to unappreciated her family. She does not care about them, she only cares about herself and what will benefit her. The grandmother’s selfishness, judgmental actions, dishonesty put the family in danger.

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The grandmother uses Jesus as a scapegoat to show how she is a child of God while the Misfit tells of how he really perceives Jesus and that there is no justification of his actions. In the event of the car accident, the Grandmother was left with a physical crisis that quickly showed as her family was sent off into the woods to be killed one by one. This soon transitioned to a spiritual crisis both between the Grandmother and the Misfit as she uses Jesus's name to try and escape her fate. This spiritual crisis leads the characters to express their personal conception of reality and how they perceive the revelation of the situation that they are in. The Grandmother has a sense that reality should revolve around her and that she should manipulate tools such as religion to benefit her outcome.

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The Role of Family in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O’Connor is a short story that brings out mystery and cruelty. Manipulation plays a big role in this story by the grandmother. She tends to manipulate her family and tends to get her way by playing with them. Although the author wanted to give many perspectives of the grandmother, we as reader got our own views of her.

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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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