Toribio Mendez Discussion 8

On the surface “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is about a family that ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time after suffering a car accident, and is murdered one by one by a group of psychopathic murderers that have escaped from prison. When you fully analyze the characters and what they go through, the story can be broken down with more detail. In my interpretation, it is about a family full of rotten attitudes that are met by bad karma in the most extreme fashion. It’s like when Regina George from the movie “Mean Girls” is hit by a Bus by the end of the film. In reality did her horrible actions mean she deserved to go through that? No, but since it’s fiction and no real harm is done, there can be a sense of “that’s what you get” for some. It is very clear that the grandmother in the story is racist by the way she spoke about the poor children with no pants that they drove by, or the story she told about the black boy that stole the watermelon. By the way her family never condemns the way she speaks about black people, I can only assume they didn’t have an issue with her politics. During the climax of the story, the grandmother pulls every trick out of the book to try and stop the group of men from continuing their acts of evil when finally the killer had enough and finished the job. The punch to the ground beforehand was more about his conflicting feelings about religion than what the grandmother had to say, he seemed tired of her talking and finally reached a boiling point when she touched him. The misfit says that the grandmother would’ve been a good woman if someone had threatened her life at all times as if he recognized that everything she was saying was solely an attempt to preserve her life.