Tamar Abelson Discussion 8

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is a story about a family that had unfortunate luck and got killed by a criminal on the surface. I think the story in its “interior” is about human behaviors and punishment. The grandmother is very arrogant and judgmental. She thinks of herself as a good person but in real life she is racist and superficial. It’s funny how all of her decisions, which her family followed by her manipulation, lead them to this terrible incident. She chose to take the cat and hide it which led them to the accident when the cat jumped on Bailey. The accident was on a road where there was almost no one to help them because she decided to take the dirt road to see the house she thought was in Georgia (she also lied saying there was a secret panel in this house to convince the kids to go there). And finally, she wanted to go to Tennessee instead of Florida trying to convince her son not to go there because a criminal that just escaped, the misfit. Ironically they ran into the misfit on this dirt road and they all got killed. The grandmother was also very selfish – when she realized the man is the misfit she called “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?”. Looks like she didn’t care at all about her son, his wife, or her grandchildren, but herself. Right before the misfit shot her she told him he is one of her own children and reached out to him. She showed some emotion, but he shot her anyway. The misfit talks about punishment a few times, maybe because of the punishment he got (maybe for a reason or maybe not). Even the misfit noticed that she wasn’t a good lady and after he killed her he said: “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”.