Siu Kwan Tsui Discussion 8

In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’ Connor, the interior story is the conflict between the grandmother and The Misfit. The grandmother is narrow-minded, superficial, manipulative, and thinks of nobody else’s desires besides her own. Therefore, she spends most of the story manipulating the family to concede to her desires. Things such as going to Tenessee instead of Florida for the family vacation and visiting an old house she remembered growing up are examples of this behavior. The Misfit is a character mentioned throughout the text as an evil criminal that, on the surface, should be a classic good vs. evil story. Instead, what happens is he brings a momentary instance of redemption for the grandmother as she nears the final moments of her life. She attempts to comfort The Misfit with a touch on the shoulder during a moment of vulnerability and says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (O’Connor par. 135). The Misfit immediately shoots her when he is touched, and afterward, he says, “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (par. 139) Therefore, the tragedy in the interior is that it took a very violent and tragic event to force her into showing some compassion for someone other than herself.