In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor creates characters who are constantly convicted for their actions. She vividly shows how their lives are drastically changed by a simple twist of fate. The grandmother searches for redemption. Through The Misfit she finds it in the most bizarre way. The Misfit shows us the perspective of a man whose soul is tormented by the presence of God. O'Connor gives the reader a startling and surprising new outlook on life and religion through these two characters.

The grandmother thinks of herself as a "good Christian," but places more emphasis on appearing like one than acting like one. She is careful to wear her best clothes when traveling so that "anyone seeing her dead ... would know at once that she was a lady." This character lives in a kind of spiritual void, because she accepts without real commitment. The grandmother constantly criticizes others as the source of problems and insists that "In my time [...] people did right." At one time she is completely indifferent to the suffering and poverty of "little niggers in the country." In a perfect world, the grandmother

might never have realized the hypocrisy of her ways, but when she was faced with a stark reality, she learned a costly lesson. In her desire to control circumstances and people, the grandmother unwittingly leads her family to The Misfit.

The grandmother's emphasis on the importance of prayer symbolizes her realization of death she knew she was to endure. Her prayer reminds us of the practice of having a priest by your deathbed while you say your final graces. In this case The Misfit was the priest. The Misfit is representing the priest, or even Jesus, when he states "It was the same case with Him [Jesus] as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one." He plays judge, jury, and redeemer to the grandmother as he kills her. In that one brief moment of grace, he has given the grandmother a deeper joy and satisfaction than she has ever known in her many years of being disconnected from the reality of life.

Through her meeting with The Misfit, the grandmother learns the difference between what she wants to believe and the reality of things. She naively hopes that her insistence that he is a "good man [who] must come from nice people" will somehow change the fact that he is a cold-blooded killer. The Misfit, tortured by his inability to know for sure if redemption is possible, is unable to accept compassion, thus committing himself t

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Approximate Word count = 933
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)