In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor tries to connect readers with the true meaning of Christianity through death and grace. The author shows how grace is an important aspect of Christian theology. The author named the place where the party took a detour ‘Grace’ to connect the theme of grace in Christian theory. Christians in modern-day society misplace their grace on earthly material that amounts to suffering. The author expounds on the latter ideology using Grandmother, who lured the party to take a detour to Tennessee from Florida. Unknown to the grandmother, the Misfit gang invested the detour route. Even though the grandmother wanted to save guard her daughters from the gang, she subjected them to the gang’s hands. At the story’s beginning, the grandmother perceives herself as a superior person. She prejudiced Misfit as an evil person from the story she leads in the newspaper. The latter ideology changed when she encountered Misfit. In summary, the story illustrates that Extraordinary situations (Grandmother’s encounter with Misfit) can help a person understand the true meaning of grace.
Daily Archives: March 19, 2022
In my opinion, the story in its interior refers to the intension of the story. In the text, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind…Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head…Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that a loose in it”. At the beginning of the story, the grandmother uses a newspaper story of an escaped convict heading to Florida to try to convince her son, Bailey, to go to Tennessee. Whether she uses fear or guilt, her main goal stands as getting to Tennessee. However, when Bailey refuses to budge on altering the trip’s course, she willingly goes along, revealing that she never truly feared they’d run into the criminal known as The Misfit.
I think in its interior, this story is a complex psychological evaluation of the Grandmother character, and what she represents. She is very stubborn and stuck in the ways of the past. It also seems like she literally sees people as black and white. The racist story about the watermelon and talking about how the little boy not wearing pants was telling of her feelings about black people. She also assumes because the Misfit is a handsome white boy, that he must come from a good family background. And that he’s probably a good christian and prays and things like that. In the end it’s what got them all killed. She ended up being her own worst enemy, and that parallels with the Misfits life story as well. He was falsely accused of a crime, went to prison, then started actually committing crimes. I think that’s a lot of the interior of this story
The Lecture “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” by Flannery O’Connor is about the suspense and selfishness the grandmother conveys when she convinces her family to go on a trip to Tennessee instead of Florida just for her own interests. The way she convinced them to take a trip to Tennessee is by telling them that the Misfit had escaped the penitentiary. In the lecture it states “Then, in what ends up being a fatal act of selfishness she brings her cat along on the trip even though she knows Bailey doesn’t like to travel with the cat”. The grandmother has such a big ego that anything she does not want to happen, she will get an idea on how to avoid it. Also, in the lecture it says “Along the way she regales them with a story from her youth when she was courted by Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden. She would have done well to marry him, she says, because he became a very rich man. Through the Grandmother ’s nonstop chatter we see how superficial, small-minded, ignorant, hypocritical, and self-satisfied she is”.
