ENG 113
Instructor Risch
Donna Stevens
January 22, 2011
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
My initial response to the reading was that I found it pointless to kill the family. I cringed at the grandmother’s stupidity, and much like watching a train wreck, saw the family picked off one by one. The grandmother had a charm and comedy to her that I related to a character Betty White could easily play. However, much like the characters Betty White plays, she had no common sense. I could see that she really got on her son’s nerves and that he married a wife who had a lot in common with his mother. The work gained my interest as the grandmother convinces Bailey her son to take the family to Tennessee. Again the grandmother’s intellect shines as she remembers the house she spur of the moment decided to tour was actually in Tennessee and not Georgia. She had led the family down a dirt road in Georgia, looking for a house that was actually in Tennessee and they had a car accident. They were found by escaped criminals who killed the family one by one. The criminals stole several articles of clothing, but other than that really had no motive.
O’Connor portrays the family as an average family who happens to have a controlling grandmother with no common sense as a driving force. The grandmother’s child like sense of humor and maneuvering to get her way was the most comical part of the story. Like a child, she knew how to “pitch a fit” to get her way. She used bribery in paragraph nine when she pressured June her granddaughter to beg her father to go to Tennessee, “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your hair” (449). She used fear when she said in the first paragraph about the newspaper reporting that the ex-convict was heading toward Florida so Bailey should not take the family. She said she would “not take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it” (449). The bond of love, blood and common dwelling are the qualities about the family that we are supposed to take seriously.
The attached readings by Karen Bernardo pertaining to this reading suggest that the grandmother was evil and the Misfit was good. Bernardo states that the grandmother was a hypocrite and the Misfit never made any claims to be a Christian, so in his honesty, he was more pure. The Misfit did not claim to have any morals to begin with, so just to have a purpose in life, he becomes a murderer. O’Connor’s work in Bernardo’s opinion has portrayed that one is simply a believer in God or not and that there is no in between lifestyle. I agree with this principal. One is either in or out. However, it is a stretch for me that the Misfit represents good and the grandmother alone is evil. Furthermore, in the commentary by Karen Bernardo she remarks that the grandmother has an opportunity to be saved while she is staring at the unsaved murderer. The grandmother’s last words were “ Why you’re one of my babies” (459). To me, that was a last plea for her life. She was trying to guilt the murderer into not killing someone that was old enough to be his mother. Guilt is how this woman operated her whole entire life. Why should the day she died be any different? She was not having an opportunity to see herself as a lost person before God, she was trying to guilt a young man into not murdering her. That is the reason he jumped back after she said that. The Misfit had a painful past to say the least and he made sure he killed her so she would shut up. Furthermore, at the end of the story, Bobby Lee said “She was a talker, wasn’t she?”(459). This was a simple minded woman’s attempt to save her own life and not an attempt to grow closer in the Lord. Lastly, in Bernardo’s commentary, she remarks that God used the Misfit to draw the entire dysfunctional family closer to him. What good would it do to realize they needed the Lord after they were already dead? It is too late then. If one dies without knowing Christ as their Savior, they split hell wide open, it is as simple as that. To be saved is to know Christ as your personal Savior. You must do this BEFORE you die. In my opinion, Bernardo thinks that when a person dies, they are brought closer to God. This is only true of the children of God. God brings his children to him when they die. People who reject Christ and live their entire lives rejecting him are not children of God and need not expect to live with him forever. He will not draw them closer. In fact, he will not even look at them.
The grandmother’s concerns about the trip to Florida foreshadow the events of the story because she told the family that if they went to Florida they would be killed by the ex-convict. They ran in the opposite direction and ran smack into him anyway. This foreshadowing did not prepare me for the fact that O’Connor would pick off the entire family. I expected more conflict and much more motive for the entire family to have been killed. O’Connor’s motive was simply that they were not believers so they just became murderers. That was just not enough for me.
The grandmother was the central character because she “drove” literally every decision the family made. She drove them toward Tennessee instead of Florida and unknowingly drove them to their deaths. Also, she was the last one killed.
Red Sammy’s purpose in the story is to reiterate the fact that one cannot trust anyone. This is a foreshadowing of the ex-convicts murdering the family. Also he says that “A good man is hard to find” (452). He explained how a few boys skipped out on the bill a few days ago. This makes the reader think that those boys could have been the murderers. The grandmother calls Red Sammy a good man, but then she is not really a good judge of character is she? His view of life relates to the story’s conflicts in that the family ran up on a few boys that should have helped them, but instead, they murdered them. His mantra is that “A good man is hard to find” (452). Certainly this was true of the dysfunctional family in the woods on that fateful day.
The Misfit is named so because instead of being a simple unbeliever, he gives his life over to becoming a murderer just to pass the time. He is not simply insane. He is fully aware that he is taking lives for the fun of it. He planned to walk into the woods and murder that family. He told the boys he was with that he would occupy the grandmother and would finish her off last. He did so because she got on his nerves the most. It gave him pleasure to shut her up. This was not insanity. The grandmother’s response is like it always is; she tries to manipulate the situation with guilt or fear. She chooses guilt with the Misfit because after all, he is the one with the gun.
The reason that the Misfit said that “Jesus thown everything off balance” is because he does not want to surrender his life to Christ, he wants to live for himself (459). His conflict is that he is accountable because of Christ. Religion plays into this story because even the Misfit knows that the Bible says murder is wrong. At the end of the story, the Misfit said “She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (459). She reminded him of someone in his past, maybe his own mother who got on his nerves with the hypocritical guilt and the nagging, and of course, the incessant talking. He shot her three times and would have shot her more if she had made another sound.
The overall tone of the story was an attitude of simple old fashioned southern times. Days were long, nights were sultry and a mother’s guilt sang one to sleep. The tone toward the subject matter of murder was casual and flippant. The tone toward the readers was a simple layer of taking the characters that the readers cared about out back and shooting them. The tone is disappointingly consistent. Her use of tone left me wanting to read a real murder mystery.
Coincidence is used to advance the plot when the family runs into the murders while running in the opposite direction. The irony at the end of the story is when the grandmother is shot and “her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (459). This is probably the only time the grandmother smiled without talking. The fact that the sky was “cloudless” and had not a problem in the world was in contrast to the family’s horrifically fatal storm (459).
The title points to the story’s theme that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” because the family finds out that no one can be trusted (449). One can be murdered with absolutely no motive at all. However, in my opinion, if one is going to write about murder, a fully developed motive should at least be a strong and compelling part of the story.
Works Cited
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Michael Meyer. Massachuttes: Bedford, 2011. Print.
