I believe that the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is really telling the story of how hard it is to change one’s way of thinking. In the story, one of the main characters, the Grandmother is a beyond shallow, ignorant and judgmental, selfish woman. She remains that way even when coming face to face with death itself. She looks a convicted felon, whose crimes she is aware of, and believes that he is still inherently good solely based on his noble background. Even after the Misfit orders the death of her own son, daughter in law and grandchildren, she still insists on him being good. Her faulty outlook on the world is so deeply implemented, that not even a situation so stressful can overrule it. Not even the possibility of death can turn her into a “good” or at least “better” person.
Daily Archives: March 20, 2022
`Internally this story is about one’s morality and how it changes based on various internal and external factors. This can mainly be seen in the grandmother as a character. While she is not a literal evil person, she carried some evil beliefs which caused her to be seen as a bad person. It is plausible to say she internally feels this as she dresses above her class to seem more eloquent. This also plays into the fact that one’s morality is not governed by looks. This is prominently seen with the grandmother’s encounter with the Misfit. She incorrectly assumes he is a good person based on his looks even though he was already known as a vicious killer. One aspect about morality is that one’s ideals can change how they personally view themselves. This is seen in the Misfit did not see himself as culpable for his own actions. These characters are polar opposites of each other.
The interior of O’Conner’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is truly terrifying. Like in most stories foreshadowing can be seen when the grandmother warns her son about going to Florida because of the Misfit, though in suspenseful horror fashion he ignores her and they go there anyway. What can be taken away from this story is a lesson of what can happen when a person is bullheaded and thinks that they are correct. Examples are the grandmother being embarrassed that she was wrong and her son for not listening in the first place regardless of the chances of actually passing the Misfit by. I feel akin to Stephan Gresham’s point made in his essay about the tale that this story is much more frightening in the imagination of the reader regarding what is not shown than what actually is. This is a story that shows anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
It’s time for a family trip of some kind, and there’s a disagreement in the family about where to go. Bailey wants to take his family, (i.e., his wife, baby, and two kids, John Wesley and June Star), to Florida. His mother, called simply “the grandmother,” doesn’t want to go there.The Grandmother shows her nostalgia for what she sees as a simpler and better time. Her reflection—that she should have married the man who died rich off Coca-Cola stock—makes it clear that worldly concerns are more important to her than spiritual ones (or even ideas of romantic love). The Grandmother once again shows the racism inherent in her worldview and longing for the “Old South,” as she portrays the black “boy” in the story as just a simple and comic figure. The story ends with him telling his cronies, who’ve returned from shooting the others, to dump her body with the rest. “She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” he says.
In the story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” by O’Connor I believe that the interior part of the story is about how a grandmother of the family has brought evil upon all of them and tries to convince the family to start heading towards Tennessee for a get away break instead of allowing them to go to Florida and her reason for them not to go to Florida is because their was a article she has read about convicts going to Florida and she does not want her family to get into trouble. While they are on the way to their destination the grandma realizes that they could be heading the wrong way and a few moments after they are ambushed by three men who get out of a car but the Grandma thinks she realizes one of them and that they are trying to go after her whenever they have the chance so to try and stop it they try to disguise the grandma in different suits so that no one realizes her or has any idea.
