As O’Connor says, readers “should know what is going to happen in this story so that the element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior.” Her intent is to use the story as an instrument of Christian faith, to show the faith of the grandmother and the good-evil dichotomy. However, my thoughts go more along the lines of Stephan Gresham in that I see the piece only in an agnostic light. The malicious stranger is simply that, evil in the world. The grandmother’s epiphany and preaching only showed how useless her faith was, in the end. O’Conner herself makes the point that “it is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially.” One has to question though, what good it is if the grandmother was only able to reach her epiphany at the end of her life, up until which she had spent her time ignorant, and manipulating those around her for her own selfish desires. O’Conner ends with foreshadowing that the grandmother was able to touch the heart of the Misfit, but the cynic in me believes that it was just a drop off the back of the malicious stranger.
Daily Archives: March 16, 2022
A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a short story about a family from the south. They’re on their way to Florida but run into some conflict on the way. The character we are going to focus on is the grandmother. But throughout the story, we see what each character thinks a good man is to them, or what it means to be a good man. O’Connor mirrors her perspectives on society through all of the characters in the story. The grandmother is a selfish person and when the Misfits took them away, she only cared about herself, she is kind of self-centered. When we meet Sammy’s character, he believes he is a good person because he lets some strangers buy gas on credit. The Misfit is a character that is supposed to be bad but is more aware (I guess you can say) than the other characters in the story. He’s bad because he’s a serial killer, but he knows right from wrong, he’s passionate and self-aware. He’s not fake (I guess you can say) like the other characters. In the lecture “Where Is the Goodness?” in activity 4 on page 9 it shows the character chart. So there is a little bit of each type of person in the story I’d say and this is what O’Connor wanted to show us. So overall I believe the story on its interior is just to show us how some people are in society through and it shows in the characters in the story.
In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the author uses an egocentric character of the grandmother; the grandmother’s superficiality is somehow true for most of us who profess to be Christians. She’s paying lip service to the superficial notion of being Christians, however not treating it as seriously as the Misfit does. In addition, the grandmother’s hypocrisy, self-entitlement, and futility made that clear by a touch comparable to a bit of hard luck, also she never had a clue about life and things she pretended to care about the most. The age dynamic and social and cultural gap is perfectly investigated during the whole family’s ordeal. And the family was unequipped in every aspect to deal with the darkness of life outside their illusory place of comfort, and security. Great thing Flannery archived by making the Misfit utterly unlikeable, despite his effort to believe and portray himself as a decent man. Only someone as manipulative as the grandmother would manipulate him.
This story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” in its interior is about suspense and karma. The suspense is all in how he keeps the old woman on her toes wondering if she will live or die. He is toying with her the whole time as if attempting to show a false sense of a moral dilemma about whether he would kill her or not, knowing full well the whole time she was dead from the start as soon as she crossed his path. The karma is in how the old lady’s manipulative words finally didn’t get her what she wanted and actually ended with her family dying because of her letting it slip that she recognized him as the misfit. It was also a lesson to show the old lady not to be so judgemental and in the end that judgement bites her in the butt and at the last moment she finally sees that judging people like she has was wrong and sees him as someone as her own child just gone down the wrong path.
The interior of the story is about the devastation of a whole family brought by the grandmother. Looking at the consequence, the cause of death for six family members is thought to be attributed to Misfit. Obviously, Misfit plays a villain role in the story who doesn’t have any good. But if we compare him with the grandmother, we will find out there are many similarities between them. They both lacked the love and care from the family. Misfit, in a extreme way, murders his father. The grandmother, in a different way, decides to tease them after she fails to persuade them to go to Tennessee. Even though she clearly knows the plantation is in Tennessee instead of Georgia, she lies to the kids, making them not have a good time. By doing so, not only she can let the family feel disappointment going to Florida, but also can make them regret not going to Tennessee. However, after they have a car accident, her plan is destroyed. Dramastically, even when she knows Misfit is killing his family, she just says he should pray but never tells him how to do that or how he can be a good man. Until the moment she is being killed, she suddenly shows the greatness of motherhood, which is considered a good characteristic. However, it is too late for her to be good.
The element of suspense in the story of O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is definitely present in its interior. It is not just a story about a family of six with Grandmother presented as evil. Although it is indeed true that neither her intellect nor grace is comparable to that of Misfit, there is something special about her that makes her not solely a negative character (O’Connor 97). This special lies not on the surface but in the interior of the story, on the level that can be called Divine and invisible for a superficial reader. The Christian view of the world makes the story deeper and leaves this element of suspense after the final encounter of the Grandmother and Misfit. The seconds before her death, she opens her heart for compassion and thus, not only demonstrates this ‘good heart’ but appears to influence Misfit as well. At the end of the narrative, he admits that the violence does not give him pleasure. As O’Connor states herself, the violence in her story is a way to make the characters ready to accept their moment of grace (98). The suspense of the story remains in the possible beginning of Misfit’s transformation. Moreover, it is not only about Misfit as a character but about humanity as a whole. Therefore, the suspense lies in the inner self of the Grandmother, and its ability to affect other antagonists and the world.
