Hayra Fabri Guimaraes, Week 8 Discussion

The story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by O’Connor may seem like a unusual tragedy storytelling at its first glance — a story about a cruel serial killer that in a pitiless acts decided to take away the lives of a family of six members, without any apparent motivation besides disregard for their existence. However, when diving deep into the narrative and analyzing not only the prior events before the tragedy but also every character — from the grandmother to the children — we realize that the short novel is much more about the duality of the human kind more than anything else. 

The reason for that observation is based mostly, but not only, on the grandmother’s character. Throughout the whole story she shows herself as a racist, selfish, shallow and manipulative person that still believes that being christian makes her inherently good individual. On the other side, Misfits — the serial killer — can be seen as a calm, rational and self aware figure, despite his lack of empathy for human life. One may argue that in a different occasion, he could be a good person. 

The “interior” on this novel is to show that despite the antagonist’s brutal acts towards that family, being “good” or “bad” is a condition that goes beyond that, in places that we are yet to discover inside the human mind.