Week 8 Discussion

  In the essay about suspense in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by O’Connor, we know what the story is about on the surface. In its interior, I feel the story is about karma and dharma. Karma is the result based on a person’s actions throughout all of their lives, past and present. These actions are related to a person’s dharma, and whether or not they have fulfilled their duties of being a truly good human being. In this story it teaches us that nothing good comes from being selfish and if you are selfish, you or your loved ones may suffer your consequences. The grandmother manipulated her family to do what she wanted, and this was selfish of her. This led to the death of her and her family. This story describes there’s two different types of people, those who know they are bad people such as the Misfit and those who are bad people but portray to believe that they are good such like the grandmother.

“a good man to find” is a story of karma and how it comes back to bite you further down the line. The grandmother falls victim to someone with a mentality much like hers. The man who holds her hostage manipulates the situation to his benefit much, like the grandmother does in order to get her family to do what she wants.

In the essay “A Good Man is Hard To Find” the interior in this story would be selfishness and guilt I believe. In the story, the grandma did not want her and her family to go to Florida for one reason and that was because they were afraid of the misfit. At the being of the story, she said she had a feeling that they were going to get attacked by the misfit, and also she heard that he was going towards Florida and that was also a way of her trying to convince her son to go to Tennessee, They end up getting to an accident which led to her family being in danger three men ran across them which happen to be the misfit man she was trying to stay away from. The misfit believed that he was a good man and the grandmother knew the background and was saying he was also a good man fear never feared the grandma and I thought that was really selfish of her while her whole entire family passed away knowing they were scared the grandma passed away happy.

Flannery O’Connor has presented to the readers a piece of morale puzzle, in which no one is a true hero with perfect characteristics and committed no wrongdoings. Through the eyes of the grandmother, a self-righteous and hypocritical protagonist who guilt trips others into her own benefits, we can discover the darkness of human nature. There is no true definition for what a “good man” is meant to be and how a “good man” is supposed to act; it changes based on how one views others. We can see this portrayed by the grandmother, and a man is “good” if they hold the same moral values. The grandmother calls Red Sammy a “good man” because he trusts people and lets them charge gas on “credit” while also misses the old-time like the grandmother in which they both believe things are getting terrible and people are no longer innocent. However, the grandmother also says that she knows the Misfit is a “good man” at heart, and he will not shoot a lady when she knows that she is the only one left of the family and everyone else has been shot. She was careless of other family members and was only worried about herself and her lady’s appearances, as we know that even if she had on a “navy straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim,” anyone who found her dead on the highway would know she was a lady. The grandmother desperately calls the Misfit a “good man,” claiming that he does not have “common blood” she does so out of selfishness, wanting to skew the Misfit into having the same moral code as she does. In contrast, the Misfit has enough recognition of himself that he knows he “ain’t a good man,” but also not […]

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.

`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.

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.

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”.

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 story is gothic in nature and centers on The Misfit and his grandma. The Misfit is unique among the characters in that he is passionate, whilst the rest are passive (O’Connor 07). At the conclusion of the story, the reader is given the opportunity to read the discussion between The Misfit and his grandma. One thing is certain: the grandma was a hypocrite who believed in the virtues. The grandma believed that whatever she did was right and that she was teaching her children the Lord’s ways. However, with closer examination of her jabber, it becomes clear that she was a hypocrite, superficial, and flawed woman. By contrast, the Misfit lacked faith and was overwhelmed by his own pain and the suffering of others as a result of secular and divine laws’ injustices (O’Connor 09). When The Misfit is labeled as the lone person who understands the hardship of finding a good man, the story’s gothic element is revealed.  Notably, despite their disparate personalities, both the grandmother and The Misfit are products of grace. There is a blurring of what is good caused by the grandmother’s constant belief that everything is wonderful, which makes it difficult to discern what is not good. Both the grandmother and the Misfit have several flaws, have fallen into sin, and are fundamentally defective; nonetheless, they are both recipients of redemption, since all individuals are rescued by grace. The story demonstrates that only God determines who will enter heaven, which indicates that even people who commit sin can enter paradise as a result of God’s rescuing love. The grandma and the Misfit do not deserve grace for their awful characteristics, yet God chooses them both, conveying the readers that even bad people have a chance to enter heaven via God’s grace.

In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the depth or interior of the story is centralized around the grandmother and her ways of life. She preaches the whole time of how people were better back in the day but fails realize she is apart of the problem. She sees people in a different light than of herself and until the end she tries to portray this holy woman of god persona. She believes that appearances should be the entire basis of what or how someone should be perceived inside. She tells the misfit that he looks like a good man and thus should deep down be one. She is also certain that he would never kill a lady and tries to use this as protection for herself and never once tries to do the same for the others. Outside of the struggles the family is going through the main one purpose of the story is to shine light on the ugliness inside of the grandmother.

In its “interior”, I feel that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is about how the absence of “bad” or “evil” doesn’t necessarily make a person “good”. O’Connor introduces us to several characters, all of whom are very unlikeable. Bailey seems always annoyed, his wife doesn’t have much personality and both of their children are bratty and rude. The grandmother, however, is the one that stands out as having the attributes that are commonly considered as belonging to someone who is “good”. She dresses well, she believes in Jesus, she’s old, and she pretends to care for her grandchildren’s well-being. While none of these characters is actually too awful, none has any qualities that would indicate they were a good human being. I think O’Connor intentionally created these characters to be relatable to the reader, not necessarily that we personally identify with them, but in the sense that we all know people like each of these characters. We don’t consider them to be bad people, we might even subconsciously consider them to be good people if they are wealthy, religious, or take care of themselves physically. We especially don’t consider them to be bad when there is always the bad guy, or “Misfit”, to whom we can compare them.

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. 

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, to my interpretation, the meaning of the story on an interior level, is to enhance the beauty and the madness within the world we live in, in a way deemed cruel and unfortunate to the perception of the average reader. Beneath the surface, this literature represents the depth behind how perspective is relative. Obviously, an entire family being murdered does not represent the beauty of life to many; however, to The Misfit, the madness that he participates in throughout his life is part of the “beauty” of being a human who has never chosen to embrace the light of life. On the contrary, to the family, things such as the beautiful white house with “hidden silver” the grandmother and children wanted to see, and the land on the drive there, the nice traveling weather, are representations of beauty in life. Perspective is relative as you can see, relative to your past, upbringing, your environment, your surroundings, morals, etc. Similarly, the perspective of the grandmother initially, shifts by the end of the story. Originally, she seems selfish and hypocritical, naive to the broadness of what makes the world what is was at that point. Toward the end, you begin to feel empathy for her, as she is trying to reassure The Misfit he is a good person. Why? Her life is in danger and her family’s been killed. The beauty in the madness of that situation is you see how life, during good and bad, evokes various parts of your being, as this did for her, showing how perspective is relative to sources only available through the lens of the interpreter at the very moment. Good and evil are purely human concepts developed as a way for us to compare one another, “A Good […]

In the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor shows the elements of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior, for example, the Grandmother at first you might think she’s a regular woman (grandmother) but later as the story goes on, things start to show up, that she’s very selfish, she will manipulating the family to get what she wants. At first, she forces Bailey(her son) to change the trip from Florida to Tennessee with news of “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit… did to these people” and cries about it that she wouldn’t let her children go there. Later on the trip, she knows Bailey hate traveling with a cat but she still brought with it on, also the dress she dressed very fancy, it ironic for me because it just trips why do you dress up like this, and later she explained that if she ends up dead on the road, people would find her will know she was a lady, which brings an idea for me to think, she probably means even if she is dead on the road if people find her they will know she was a lady(in a pure way, let people think she’s kind, innocent, and friendly). Baily her son, didn’t talk much in the story probably just sick and tired of his mother, just like a doll to her.

O’Connor states that in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”,  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”. If you know what happens in the story, then upon reading it you can see clear signs of foreshadowing that hints at how the story will end. The first sign of foreshadowing has to do with how the grandmother was dressed. She was described as being elegantly dressed and even mentions how if she were to die she would still keep her “ladylike” appearances. The grandmother unintentionally prepares herself for the exact incident she mentions. Another sign of foreshadowing is when they notice a graveyard fenced in on a hill where a plantation used to be. The grandmother refers to it as a “family graveyard” and has “five or six graves”, one for each family member. The graveyard represents the family and their impending death.  

I believe that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” interior is about the way people change their ways when put in a dangerous situations. From the beginning of the story, we notice that the grandma is a very selfish and manipulating lady. She tries to convince her family to go to Tennessee instead of Florida by telling them that there is a Misfit on the loose and it would be very dangerous to go to Florida because of it. And that Tennessee could be a great learning experience for the kids. On the trip, they encounter the Misfit and his guys and the family is slowly killed one by one. The grandmother is the last to be killed but before she is, she tried to convince the misfit to not kill her by telling him he is a good man. The misfit states “she would have been a good women..if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This quotes implies that the grandmother only change her ways from a selfish, hypocritical, and manipulating woman to a Christian faith and “kind” woman when she is put in a violent situation. Which ties to the title that “a good man is hard to find”.

In the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor the “interior” the author speaks of means that the character in her story, the grandmother whos a religious person but also very much racist who constantly passes judgment on others and an annoying character overall, and also the Misfit who’s a criminal and an ignorant man who believed the world punished him from doing what they (society) thought was wrong because he didn’t believe there was a right or wrong thing to do. Although these characters are described differently they’re both similar in a way because both of these characters at the end try to find mercy and not for one other but for themselves, The grandmother before dying had a self-reflection of her evil actions and so did the Misfit after killing the grandmother, he also came to a self-reflection that the grandmother was actually a good person and not everyone was unkind, The “interior” meaning was that anyone can change and these two characters in the story were a good example of two horrible characters have a self-reflection toward the end of the story.

In the essay about suspense in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor writes that readers, like the ancient Greek viewers of tragedy, “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.” We know what the story is about on the surface. What do you feel the story is about in its “interior?” I believe that the author, in saying that allowing the reader to know what’s going to happen in the story enables them to take the story from the surface to the interior is alluding to dramatic device in writing. The use of this device, I believe, allows the reader to not just become consumed with the one element of suspense. Rather, the reader, in already knowing the outcome, can shift their focus to other themes the author is trying to convey in their work- such as family dynamics, the Grandmother’s manipulative behavior, and the Misfits perception of life. The Grandmother, being the main character of the story, uses her words wisely in order to gain what she wants from others, acting as a puppeteer so to speak.  Her manipulative behavior ends up being her demise.  As the Misfit enters the story, it is difficult to get much of a read on him.  As the Grandmother tries to penetrate the emotional wall he puts up using statements about religious beliefs and questions about his past, ultimately trying to tie it into relating to him which gets her killed.  The Misfit saw past that.  The quote “Daddy was a card himself,” The Misfit said. “You couldn’t put anything over on him. He never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them.” [103-106], […]

The grandmother and Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” live by moral rules that influence their decisions, behaviors, and perceptions. The grandmother’s moral code is based on the qualities she feels define as “good” individuals. At the same time, she deceives her family on a regular basis and has only a rudimentary understanding of the world around her. The Misfit, on the other hand, follows a strict and consistent moral code. He also has real skepticism about religion. Unlike the grandma, who accepts faith without inquiry and without thought, the Misfit questions religious beliefs and considers how he should follow or not follow them. We know what the story is about on the surface. What do you feel the story is about in its “interior? The “interior” of the narrative, in my opinion, is about differences. Because each character in the novel has unique qualities, attitudes, and beliefs, I say differences. Every character in the novel, I believe, has a unique way of acting and thinking about things.  

In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O Conner the interior of this story is karma in a way because of how the grandmother was selfish and did anything to get what she wanted. When she didn’t get what she wanted she would be difficult to the people around her. She was self centered and didn’t care about anyone else other but her self, She got her karma when her family was killed due to her being difficult . In the end the grandmother saw that being this way and being selfish got her to this point with no one in her family. This led to the point of her and the misfit, where she tries to convince the misfit that he is a good person and should spare her life. This is an example of her manipulation to get her to live more longer. Death is a test of good faith but it seems the grandmother doesn’t have it.

In the story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” by O’Connor. The interior is about suspense and humor. The suspense is built around the old lady’s survival from the killing of the misfit. The misfit scares the old lady causing her to lose faith in believing she will survive. She begins to persuade him to let her live but the opposite of what she expected happened. The old lady has this self-righteous and manipulating humor. She decides to manipulate her son into not traveling to Florida by trying to act like it’s for the safety of the family. When in reality she just wanted to travel to visit family in Tennessee. She uses logic when using fear and guilt to try and convince her son to do what she wants. The old lady selfish manipulated ways caused her family to go on a detour that led them to death and her in the hands of the misfit. The old lady tries to manipulate everyone around her to get what she wants but in the end, it does not work with the misfit.   

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, Grandma is a lady with classical taste. She is older, but energetic and logical, a wonderful companion for Mr. Bailey’s children. She appreciates life and life by presenting herself as a lady in a beautiful dress. She has an instinct for pride and superiority, as she always retains her precious grace. When traveling as a family, the grandmothers talked and entertained their grandchildren with games and jokes. Her grandchildren were rude to her. There were many situations where there were negative behaviors and comments. This grandmother is also a dramatic storyteller; she tells the children that when she tells them the story they would shut up. She tells of her own story, her story of her love with Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden of Georgia, who brought her watermelon on Saturday when a Negro ate it. Grandma laughs because she thinks he’s funny but the kids don’t like him. It is noted that she had an incredibly high ego and boasted of being superior to others, she is a very negative person, however, neither her pride nor her superiority instinct could not save her from the sad end she had.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Flannery O’Connor tries to paint a picture depicting the possibility of divine grace in a fight between good and evil. The story revolves around a family planning a tour to Florida, with the grandmother being the main character. She preferred going to Tennessee, but the family did not change their plans even after informing them of the Misfit’s gang in Florida. In many instances, the grandmother applied the term “good” indiscriminately, clouding the definition of a good man. She does this continuously until the term entirely loses its meaning.  In Red Sammy’s incident, we see her definition of “good” to include blind faith, poor judgment, and gullibility. Sammy asks her why she let two strangers charge their gasoline after angrily protesting people’s general untrustworthiness. Despite the obvious situation that he had been defrauded, the grandmother replied that he did it because he is a “good man.” The grandmother later recognizes the Misfit and asks him if he would shoot a lady; the fact that he never replies that he would not denotes that he does not subscribe to the same moral code as she does. It was that very recognition that consequently led to the whole family’s death. Nevertheless, the grandmother proceeds to call him a good man, denoting some form of underlying value that the Misfit would not want to deny. In this incident, she defines “good” as asymmetrical, revealing her claim that he does not have “common blood” with her. Succinctly, the grandmother was of a good heart, which compelled her to judge others as good despite the situation. Good people eventually get hurt by the evil people in society as we see grandmother continuously clinging to her superficial definition of good. O’Connor depicts how a person of the good heart may be taken advantage of by people […]

In “Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Mary Flannery O’Connor, the writer wanted her readers to know the common element of suspense in will be transferred from its surface to its interior.  The grandmother in the story for example. In the story, the grandmother is portrayed as a person who follows moral codes, where she considers herself morally superior for being a woman. Since her thought of morality is superior, she also believes that she can justify her judgments towards others. The reason for her character is due to her past previous relationship, which both appears from her partner cheating.